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The National Gallery of Ireland has acquired Jack B. Yeats’s iconic painting Singing ‘The Dark Rosaleen’, Croke Park (1921). It was purchased in 2024, with special support from the Government of Ireland and a generous contribution from a private donor and is now on display. As one of Yeats’s few overtly political works, this painting stands as a deeply personal response from a keenly sensitive individual to a seismic moment in Irish history. It is unclear if the scene represents a specific moment Yeats observed, an amalgamation of separate sketches, or a product of his imagination. Though the work does not explicitly reference the violent events at Croke Park on 21 November 1920, known as Bloody Sunday, its title, setting, and sombre tone evoke the tragedy and its consequences.

On that day, during a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary, Auxiliaries (a paramilitary unit of the Royal Irish Constabulary) opened fire on spectators, killing 14 civilians, including Tipperary footballer Michael Hogan, and injuring 60 others. Sketchbooks in the Gallery’s Yeats archive contain multiple depictions of hurling matches at Croke Park indicate Yeats’s familiarity with the setting. When first exhibited in 1921 The Freeman’s Journal remarked on the “surge of patriotic emotion that the most dismal surroundings cannot repress.” It is a lament in the aftermath of the episode rather than a depiction of the violence itself.

The painting was stolen in the Dunsany Castle art robbery in 1990, subsequently recovered and returned to the Plunkett family in 1995. The same year the late art collector Sheila Plunkett, Lady Dunsany, sold ‘Singing the Dark Rosaleen – Croke Park’ at Sothebys for £500,000, when it was bought by Ben Dunne. The Mary and Ben Dunne Collection was sold by Gormley’s in 2022.