More than three hundred biographical entries consider the work of Irish painters of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a critical period that saw the development of easel painting, the exploration of antiquarianism and a search for the pictorial expression of national identity. Nearly forty thematic essays range widely from exhibiting practices to the social history of Irish art, revealing how pictures were produced, acquired and traded in Ireland, examining the output of painters born in Ireland but who spent their careers abroad, as well as visiting artists to Ireland.