The Stone Carriers

Artist George William Russell (Æ) (1867 - 1935)

Datec. 1904

MediumOil on panel

Dimensions45.7 x 61 cm

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Lane Gift, 1912.

Object number33

DescriptionGeorge Russell celebrated craft workers and manual labour in his art and wrote that Irishmen should aspire to “carve an Attica out of Ireland”, in other words to develop in rural parishes an intensity of life such as had existed in the city states of ancient Greece. Sir Horace Plunkett, founder of the Irish Co-Operative Movement refused to sack George Russell as editor of the Irish Homestead over Russell’s defence of works in the Lockout. Plunkett told his friends that ‘To attack the Dublin employers, Dublin Castle, the police, the Nationalist M.P.s, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Roman Catholic church over the conditions of the Dublin slums was a magnificent exhibition of moral courage’.

Two women walk across a barren landscape carrying a heavy basket filled with stones. Their individual features are indistinguishable and both are wearing sea green dresses. Apart from the stark outlining around these figures, their colouring matches their surroundings. The ground is covered with rocks and sparse vegetation, stretching into the distance until it meets the horizon. The horizon is only apparent from the thin strip of pale light seen in the distance.

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