The Old Galway Diary Podcast - Episode 262 - William Evans of Eton

Well, I want to talk this morning about a visitor who happily came to our shores, and particularly to the west of Ireland.

He came in 1835 and 1838.

And his name was William Evans of Eton.

That's what he was known as.

He was a drawing master of Eton College in England.

And he was a very accomplished artist himself.

He had exhibited widely in London, in Dublin and in Paris.

And he paid a number of visits to the West of Ireland in particular.

He produced a lot of studies, mostly watercolours, finished watercolours, and mostly of the counties of Galway and Mayo.

A mixture of the picturesque landscapes and of market scenes and street scenes in Galway.

He was very skillful about it in his work.

Oh yeah, it was wonderful.

He was actually very good and very fine.

And he also had a kind of a scientific approach A lot of his studies were of Galway City, but probably most of his work came from Connemara and South Mayo also.

And we don't know really what brought him out there, because it was a complete wilderness.

Out in the wilds is what he described it as.

A very rugged terrain that would have been very remote and very adventurous for an English artist of that time.

But he loved the parts of Ireland that had already failed to attract, as he said, failed to attract the pencils of the recording brethren of the easel and lay like a virgin on soil untouched by the plough.

Which was an interesting description of Connemara in itself.

What date was it again, Tom? 1835 and 1838.

So these pre-famine days.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh yeah, they were all pre-famine.

Now there had been two books published in the 1830s.

One by Henry Inglis, which was called A Journey Through Ireland in the Spring, Summer and Autumn of 1834.