If twentieth–century attempts to give visual form to Famine memory are to be understood within a tradition of Famine image–making, the obvious antecedents lie in the visual representations of the Irish Famine from the nineteenth century. How was the Famine visually represented and interpreted in its own time, and what meanings do such images communicate? The evolution of the visual culture and representational history of ‘the Famine’ has yet to be satisfactorily mapped, and the relationship of its nineteenthcentury iconography to latter–day visualizations both troubles and intrigues. This central question of how ‘famine’ (conceptually and historically) might be represented in visual form – either directly or obliquely – is one that perplexed artists of the nineteenth century, much as it has those working on commemorative projects since the mid–1990s. The constraints of artistic convention, market forces and shifting ideological contexts have shaped how we ‘see’ the Famine from the 1840s through to today, and its representation remains a mercurial, emotional and highly politicized endeavour.

Who was depicting the Famine, and why? The crisis in Ireland during the 1840s was a topic of keen interest for British and Irish newspapers of the period, and the parallel ascendancy of illustrated periodicals sparked an influx of artists dispatched by editors to sketch images to be translated into wood engravings for mass reproduction. The literate British public were offered accounts of forays through Famine–stricken Ireland, continuing the tradition of the eighteenth–century scenic travelogue, but now mediated by the increasingly sophisticated technology and distribution systems of illustrated newspapers. By the 1840s early photography was in limited use in Ireland, but its pioneers were neither equipped nor inclined to train their camera's eye on social subjects until the 1880s. Whilst certain of these later images have been absorbed into the visual lexicon of the Famine, no contemporary photograph of the Famine exists, and photography's impact on commemorative visualizations has been comparatively limited. Within the academy, a few painters (though no sculptors) turned their hand during the 1840s/50s to the subject of Ireland's distress, taking poverty, emigration or political unrest as their theme. Social pictures remained a minority interest until later in the century, when more numerous painted interpretations of the Irish (during and soon after the Famine period) offered increased evidence of how this catastrophic and proximate experience might be accommodated within the rigid confines of Victorian aesthetic principles.