Joseph Malachy Kavanagh

As fighting raged, the keeper, landscape painter Joseph Kavanagh, was painting one morning in Academy House when a piece of shrapnel from an exploding shell shattered a window and tore into the ceiling above him.

Whether the Helga or artillery on the ground was responsible, a newsprint barricade on the street was ignited and the fire spread uncontrollably, engulfing Academy House.

The building was consumed by fire and with it the entire annual exhibition, the library, including all records, and Kavanagh’s life’s work – understandably, he never really recovered from the loss.

[7] The fire at Academy House destroyed over 500 pieces of art, including from artists Jack Butler Yeats, Madeline Green and John Lavery.

[3] In September 1881 he won the Albert Scholarship and, along with Walter Osborne and Nathaniel Hill, travelled to Antwerp to take the "Nature" class under Charles Verlat.

[13] On a trip to Brittany with Osborne in 1883, he met up with a host of other young artists including the Irishmen Stanhope Forbes, Nathaniel Hill and Norman Garstin - all of whom were influenced by the plein air naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage.

[16] His style in this period is noted for the "strong sense of recession he creates, denoting his enduring fascination with perspectival effects...[and] his interest in architectural detail.

[2] In 1890, he published in Dublin a series of prints from etchings he created of landscape scenes from Mont St. Michel, Bruges and of "A Metallurgist" which were acquired by the British Museum in 1902.

But neither Henry Allan nor Kavanagh is sufficiently well represented in our public collections for it to be possible to form an adequate estimate of their achievement".