Grace Brady, left, executive director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University, the artist Brian Tolle, and Curator Niamh O’Sullivan were among attendees at last month’s opening for the new exhibition, “In the Lion’s Den: Daniel Macdonald, Ireland and Empire.”
Hamden, Conn. – A $16,867 grant from Connecticut Humanities will help Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University present a new exhibition, “In the Lion’s Den: Daniel Macdonald, Ireland and Empire,” this year from Jan. 20 to April 17.

This exhibition, the first of its kind in the United States and the most comprehensive ever mounted, will reevaluate the undeservedly forgotten 19th-century Irish artist, Daniel Macdonald (1820-1853).

“Macdonald holds the distinction of having produced the only known painting of the Great Hunger,” said Grace Brady, executive director of the museum. “We anticipate a great response from visitors both here and abroad.”

The centerpiece of the exhibition, Macdonald’s “An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of their Store” (1847), is crossing the Atlantic for the first time, according to Niamh O’Sullivan, the museum’s curator.

“This painting, which is displayed in the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin, and others, will highlight the lack of famine art and reveal how artists told the story of the worst demographic catastrophe of 19th-century Europe by other pictorial means,” O’Sullivan added.