Coming Home: Art and the Great Hunger is a catalogue published to accompany an exhibition of the same title that toured three venues on the island of Ireland in 2018–19. Drawn from the collections of Ireland's Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University, the exhibition was framed as a diasporic “homecoming” for artworks from the collection, and attempted to address the visual representation of the Irish Famine, 1845–1848. With four contextual essays and reasonably lengthy catalogue entries for the each artwork displayed, the publication is a useful introduction to the exhibition, and this richly volume illustrated will be welcomed by those who did not get an opportunity to visit it in person.

Following an introductory essay by Niamh O'Sullivan (to which I will return), contributions from Ciarán O'Reilly, Laurence Geary, and Brendán Mac Suibhne reflect the three counties to which the exhibition travelled: Dublin, Cork, and Derry. O'Reilly's essay provides a tantalizing insight into the world of the British administration in Dublin Castle during the crisis of the Famine, contrasting the lavish ceremonial of aristocratic society, the bureaucracy of organizing relief, and the chronic poverty and hunger that was increasing across the city and country. While the imported food and other luxury goods available to those within the castle, juxtaposed with the export of local grain, meat, and other foodstuffs, might make for a distasteful contrast, O'Reilly succinctly gestures towards the nuance needed to fully understand the experience of Famine in Dublin, much of which has not been explored in scholarship to date.

O'Reilly's essay is complemented by Geary's focus on Cork, drawing parallels between the two cities and the struggle of the authorities to provide food and shelter to rural migrants who flocked to the city, often as part of a larger migratory journey. Geary's exploration of the medical crisis that emerged from the spread of disease in the famine period and the pressures faced by the medical profession offers an engaging overview of the very practical challenges faced by those working in hospitals, workhouses and other institutions. Drawing attention to those who attended to the sick and dying, who wrote letters, accounts, and articles to the press to highlight the conditions being caused by a panoply of issues (hunger, poverty, disease, overcrowding), Geary identifies the role of the “responsible representatives” (61) of the middle classes, even if these paled in comparison to the scale of the challenge.

If O'Reilly and Geary's essays summarize aspects of upper- and middle-class responses to the Famine, Mac Suibhne's exploration of Hugh Dorian's The Years of the Famine, a diary written in 1889–90 but recording Dorian's experience of famine relief works, provides a unique perspective from someone who survived the worst effects of the period. By bringing the reader in the “grey zone” (63), Mac Suibhne convincingly argues that Dorian's account shows that there is no straightforward reading of the Famine—it is more than “an event in Anglo-Irish relations or a problem of public administration” (63) and the amorphous category of “the poor” is ill suited to understanding the nuanced social relations that pervaded the years of the crisis.

With these three contextual essays, Coming Home, rests on firm historical ground highlighting themes of current scholarship focused on the Famine, its histories and legacies. The challenge of the exhibition, and perhaps the wider project of the Ireland's Great Hunger Museum, is made plain in O'Sullivan's introductory essay, which has the unenviable task of introducing the art historical premise of the exhibition, a potted history of the broader visual culture of 1840s, and in many ways, introducing the Famine itself—outlining key dates and themes for readers who may not be familiar with this aspect of Irish history. Both of tasks themes would have been better served, perhaps, by separate essays: certainly, from an art historian's perspective, the reader is ill served by this gallop through several decades, and indeed centuries, of visual culture. While O'Sullivan gestures the broader art historical context in which many of the nineteenth-century paintings were created, the absence of any real grappling with the conditions artists in Ireland were working in leaves the paintings floating in a contextual vacuum. We learn little, for example, about training and exhibition practices in this period or about the relationship between art production and exhibition in Ireland and Britain. The impact of the Famine on artistic production and subjects is overstated, and the reader is left to find a more realistic account elsewhere. While the catalogue entries for works produced by contemporary artists on the legacy of the Famine are more sure-footed, the analysis of genre paintings from the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s leaves much to be desired. The leaps required to fit paintings created in the fifty years after crisis of the Famine are exemplified by the discussion of Henry Allen's The Rag Pickers (1900), which jumps from the artist's training in Antwerp to the shores of Dublin Bay, Victor Hugo and Édouard Manet, and, finally, the tenements of New York. While certainly refreshing in comparison to a purely formalist approach to understanding the painting, this confusing mélange of art, cultural and social history is neither fish nor fowl, and as a result, does not offer enough to serve either a scholarly or public audience.

Part of the issue with the art historical aspects of this project is that finding any meaningful relationship between the crisis and artist's representations of it in paint (leaving aside newspaper illustrations) is difficult, and as O'Sullivan admits, only a handful of artists directly tackled the subject. By insisting, however, that these paintings represent the impact of the Famine on life in Ireland, they are wrenched from a full contextual reading and yoked to a narrative that they were neither made to serve nor which stands up to scholarly scrutiny.