Patrick Hennessy RHA (1915-80), was one of Ireland’s most successful post–war realist painters. A prolific artist, he created traditional portraits, landscapes, equine studies and still-lifes, but he also created works unlike anything being made in Ireland at the time. Fusing realism with a Surrealist subjectivity learned in Paris he painted human figures isolated in the landscape, male nudes and portraits of African men that puzzled Irish critics who branded him ‘something of an outsider'