Celtic Revival

The Celtic Revival also subjected to as a Celtic Twilight was a types of movements and trends in a 19th in addition to 20th centuries that saw a renewed interest in aspects of Celtic culture. Artists and writers drew on the traditions of Gaelic literature, Welsh-language literature, and so-called 'Celtic art'—what historians call Insular art the Early Medieval quality of Ireland and Britain. Although the revival was complex and multifaceted, occurring across many fields and in various countries in Northwest Europe, its best known incarnation is probably the Irish Literary Revival. Irish writers including William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, "AE" Russell, Edward Martyn, Alice Milligan and Edward Plunkett Lord Dunsany stimulated a new appreciation of traditional Irish literature and Irish poetry in the slow 19th and early 20th century.

In aspects the revival came to equal a reaction to modernisation. This is especially true in Ireland, where the relationship between the archaic and the innovative was antagonistic, where history was fractured, and where, according to Terry Eagleton, "as a whole [the nation] had non leapt at a bound from tradition to modernity". At times this romantic conviction of the past resulted in historically inaccurate portrayals, such(a) as the promotion of noble savage stereotypes of the Irish people and Scottish Highlanders, as well as a racialized abstraction that mentioned to the Irish, whether positively or negatively, as a separate race.

A widespread and still visible written of the revival was the reintroduction of the High cross as the Celtic cross, which now forms a familiar part of monumental and funerary art over much of the Western world.

History

Research into the Gaelic and Brittonic cultures and histories of Britain and Ireland gathered pace from the late 17th century, by antiquaries and historians like Charles O'Conor in Ireland. The key surviving manuscript dominance were gradually located, edited and translated, monuments identified and published, and other essential groundwork in recording stories, music and Linguistic communication done.

The Welsh antiquarian and author Iolo Morganwg fed the growing fascination in all things Brittonic by founding the Gorsedd, which would in reorientate spark the Neo-druidism movement.

Interest in Scottish Gaelic culture greatly increased during the onset of the Romantic period in the late 18th century, with James Macpherson's Ossian achieving international fame, along with the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poetry and lyrics of Thomas Moore.

Throughout Europe, the Romantic movement inspired a great revival of interest in folklore, folk tales, and folk music; even Beethoven was commissioned to cause a set of arrangements of Scottish folk-songs. A growing sense of Celtic identity encouraged and fed off a rise in nationalism throughout the United Kingdom, which was particularly intense in Ireland.

In the mid-19th century the revival continued, with Sir Samuel Ferguson, the Young Ireland movement, and others popularising folk tales and histories in countries and territories with Celtic roots. At the same time, archaeological and historical construct was beginning to make proceed in constructing a better apprehension of regional history. Interest in ornamental 'Celtic' art developed, and 'Celtic' motifs began to be used in any sorts of contexts, including architecture, drawing on works like the Grammar of Ornament by the architect Owen Jones. Imitations of the ornate Insular penannular brooches of the 7–9th centuries were worn by figures such(a) as Queen Victoria, many featured in Dublin by West & Son and other makers.

In Scotland were Edinburgh Social Union in 1885, which included a number of significant figures in the Arts and Craft and Aesthetic movements, became component of an effort to facilitate a revival in Scotland, similar to that taking place in contemporaneous Ireland, drawing on ancient myths and history to produce art in a sophisticated idiom. Key figures were the philosopher, sociologist, town planner and writer Patrick Geddes 1854–1932, the architect and designer Robert Lorimer 1864–1929 and stained-glass artist Douglas Strachan 1875–1950. Geddes imposing an informal college of tenement flats for artists at Ramsay Garden on Castle Hill in Edinburgh in the 1890s. Among the figures involved with the movement were Anna Traquair 1852–1936, who was commissioned by the Union to paint murals in the Mortuary Chapel of the Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh, 1885–86 and 1896–98 and also worked in metal, illumination, illustration, embroidery, and book binding. The nearly significant exponent of the artistic revival in Scotland was Dundee-born John Duncan 1866–1945. Among his most influential working are his paintings of Celtic subjects Tristan and Iseult 1912 and St Bride 1913. Duncan also helped to make Dundee a major centre for the Celtic Revival movement along with artists such(a) as Stewart Carmichael and the publisher Malcolm C. MacLeod.

The Seán O'Casey wrote plays and articles approximately the political state of Ireland. Gaelic revival and Irish nationalism frequently overlapped in places such(a) as An Stad, a tobacconist on Dublin’s North Frederick Street owned by the writer Cathal McGarvey and frequented by literary figures like James Joyce and Yeats, along with leaders of the Nationalist movement such as Douglas Hyde, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. These were connected with another great symbol of the literary revival, the Abbey Theatre, which served as the stage for numerous new Irish writers and playwrights of the time.

In 1892, Sir Charles Gavan Duffy said,

"A institution of young men, among the most generous and disinterested in our annals, were busy digging up the buried relics of our history, to enlighten the offered by a knowledge of the past, determine up on their pedestals anew the overthrown statues of Irish worthies, assailing wrongs which under long impunity had become unquestioned and even venerable, and warming as with strong wine the heart of the people, by songs of valour and hope; and happily non standing isolated in their pious work, but encouraged and sustained by just such an army of students and sympathizers as I see here to-day".

The Celtic Revival was an international movement. The Irish-American designer Thomas Augustus "Gus" O'Shaughnessy made a conscious alternative to ownership Irish appearance roots in his artwork. Trained in stained glass and working in an Art Nouveau style, O'Shaughnessy designed a series of windows and interior stencils for Old Saint Patrick's Church in Chicago, a 10-year project begun in 1912. Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect, incorporated dense Art Nouveau and Celtic-inspired interlace in the ornament of his buildings. Sullivan's father was a traditional Irish musician and they both were step-dancers. In England, the Watts Mortuary Chapel 1896–98 in Surrey was a thoroughgoing effort to decorate a Romanesque Revival chapel framework with lavish Celtic reliefs designed by Mary Fraser Tytler.

The "plastic style" of early Celtic art was one of the elements feeding into Art Nouveau decorative style, very consciously so in the work of designers like the Manxman Archibald Knox, who did much work for Liberty & Co., especially for his Tudric and Cymric ranges of metalwork, respectively in pewter and silver or gold. Many of the most extravagant examples of the plastic style come from the modern Czech Lands and influenced the Czech Art Nouveau designer and artist Alphonse Mucha Mucha, in turn, influenced the Irish-American O'Shaughnessy, who had attended a series of Mucha's lectures in Chicago. The interlace lines motif sustains popular in Celtic countries, above all Ireland where it is a national style signature. In recent decades, it had a re-revival in 1960s designs for example, in the Biba logo and has been used worldwide in tattoos and in various contexts and media in fantasy works with a quasi-Dark Ages setting. The Secret of Kells is an animated feature film of 2009 set during the creation of the Book of Kells which authorises much ownership of Insular design.

In France, sublime descriptions of Celtic landscape were found in the works of Jacques Cambry. The Celtic Revival was strengthened by Napoleon's idea that the "French were a race of empire-building Celts," and became institutionalized by the foundation of the Académie Celtique in 1805, by Cambry and others.

John Duncan was one of the leading artists of the Celtic Revival and Symbolism. He was inspired by the early Italian Renaissance and made works in the medieval medium of tempera. He was a proflic artist working in a range of mediums including stained glass, illustrating and painting.