Simon Coleman RHA
Simon Coleman (1916–1995) was an Irish portrait and landscape painter born in Duleek. Over a career spanning fifty years he exhibited more than 200 works with the Royal Hibernian Academy, and painted The Council of State, a retirement gift to President Douglas Hyde from the Irish nation.
Life
Coleman studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in the 1930s and first exhibited with the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1940. He relocated to Dublin to study art, later moving back to Meath to teach at the Drogheda Technical School, where he remained based for the rest of his life.
He also spent time in the field with the Irish Folklore Commission, joining expeditions to County Donegal, County Galway and County Clare in 1949 and twice in 1959 to create visual documentation of their findings. While travelling, Coleman kept diary-like notebooks recording what he observed and the stories told to him along the way — storytellers he met often became subjects of his portraits.
Legacy
Coleman’s paintings and sketches for the Irish Folklore Commission are still used in the study of Irish folklore at University College Dublin, helping describe folk tales, history and the way of life of the people and places he visited. His journals from three expeditions around Ireland are considered by UCD’s Department of Folklore important to the preservation of Irish culture and the continued study of mythology.
Duleek in his work
Abbeylands Duleek
Duleek Wayside Cross
Landscape Duleek
Lime Tree Duleek
Main Steet Duleek
Parochial House Duleek
O’Neils Duleek
Clarkes Forge Duleek
Main Street Duleek
St Mary’s Abbey Duleek.
St. Kienan’s Church Duleek
Council Of State.
Biographical text adapted from Wikipedia, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
