Lost and found: The Story of Ireland's Most Famous War Painting

03.04.2025

Image of Lecture Event Invitation, Lost and Found: The Story of Ireland's Most Famous War Painting

The Chancellor of the National University of Ireland and Cork Public Museum
are pleased to present a lecture by Ronan McGreevy

Lost and found: The Story of Ireland’s Most Famous War Painting

at 6pm Thursday 24 April 2025
Cork Public Museum

The lecture will be followed by a guided tour of the new museum exhibition: The Last General Absolution: War, Loss & Memory, led by Gerry White.

Please register to attend at: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/nationaluniversityofireland/1649762

The Last General Absolution of the Munsters at Rue de Bois forms the cover of the recently published National University of Ireland First World War Centenary Roll of Honour and Essays edited by Ronan McGreevy and Emer Purcell and will be on sale on the night. The book can also be purchased in all good book shops or online from www.fourcourtspress.ie.

The exhibition at Cork Public Museum runs until June 2025. As part of the exhibition, one of the earliest known painted copies of the iconic Great War painting The Last General Absolution of the Munsters at Rue de Bois will be publicly displayed for the first time. Though the painting is internationally renowned, its close connections to Cork have never been explored. This exhibition will serve to tell the background of the painting, and the lives of the men depicted in it. The exhibition is a collaboration between Cork Public Museum, the Cork Branch of the Western Front Association, Cork City Council, as well as the Dublin Diocesan Archives.

In 1919, the National University of Ireland compiled a war list of all students, graduates, and staff of University College Cork, University College Dublin, and University College Galway, who had died or served in the Great War. As part of NUI’s Decade of Centenary programme, the original honour roll is reprinted in this volume along with a collection of essays. A substantive introduction accompanied by a selection of individual personal profiles brings the men recorded in the roll to life. In addition to NUI’s list, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland’s Honour Roll is also reproduced along with an essay examining NUI doctors who served during the war. For the first time, a list of the chaplains from St Patrick’s College Maynooth is presented and their lives examined. NUI’s women students, graduates, and staff and the ways in which they contributed to the war effort are also explored.

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