Through the lens of art, this book focuses on Irish people engaged in recreational activities across the last two centuries. Arranged thematically, it covers sport, music and dance, visits to the beach, religious observance and pilgrimage, theatre, circus, calendar customs, fairs and markets, pubs, clubs, and parades. The aim is to investigate the lives of Irish people away from work and to celebrate the richness and diversity of Irish society across class, community, geography, and generation, as recorded by some of the finest artists practising in the country. the book brings together works by some of Ireland's most accomplished figurative painters of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, including Richard Brydges Beechey, William Conor, William van der Hagen, Paul Henry, Sean Keating, Harry Kernoff, Charles Lamb, John Lavery, Richard Thomas Moynan, James Arthur O'Connor, William Osborne, Joseph Tudor, and Jack B. Yeats.
