Prodigal Son by Hughie O’Donoghue, which comes up at Morgan O’Driscoll’s Irish and International art auction on April 26, is based on a poignant First World War photograph from the Imperial War Museum in London. The subject – a dazed German soldier waiting for stretcher bearers – is linked by O’Donoghue to his Kerry grandfather, countless economic migrants like him and even preserved Iron Age bodies found in bogland. According to a catalogue note by Aidan Dunne they all represent painting as an act of excavation for the artist, a means of recording lost and forgotten histories of people helplessly caught up in the currents of their time like emigration, war and disaster. O’Donoghue, he explains, addresses the universal in the particular, the nature of life and the limitations within which people pursue their ambitions.