page_title: Celtic Revival
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Celtic Revival / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Exhibit in the Wedgwood Museum - Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent, England.
context_page_description: The Celtic Revival was a variety of movements and trends in the 19th and 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. 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, and Edward Plunkett stimulated a new appreciation of traditional Irish literature and Irish poetry in the late 19th and early 20th century.
  In aspects the revival came to represent a reaction to modernisation. This is particularly true in Ireland, where the relationship between the archaic and the modern was antagonistic, where history was fractured, and where, according to Terry Eagleton, "as a whole [the nation] had not leapt at a bound from tradition to modernity".
context_section_description: 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 Owen Jones in Wales and Charles O'Conor in Ireland. The key surviving manuscript sources were gradually located, edited and translated, monuments identified and published, and other essential groundwork in recording stories, music and language done.
  The Welsh antiquarian and author Iolo Morganwg fed the growing fascination in all things Brittonic by founding the Gorsedd, which would in turn 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 produce 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 especially 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 work was beginning to make progress in constructing a better understanding of regional history. Interest in ornamental 'Celtic' art developed, and 'Celtic' motifs began to be used in all 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 as Queen Victoria, many produced in Dublin by West & Son and other makers.
  In Scotland were John Francis Campbell's (1821-1885) works the bilingual Popular Tales of the West Highlands (4 vols., 1860–62) and The Celtic Dragon Myth, published posthumously in 1911. The formation of the Edinburgh Social Union in 1885, which included a number of significant figures in the Arts and Craft and Aesthetic movements, became part of an attempt 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 modern 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 established 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 most significant exponent of the artistic revival in Scotland was Dundee-born John Duncan (1866–1945). Among his most influential works 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 as Stewart Carmichael and the publisher Malcolm C MacLeod.
  The Irish Literary Revival encouraged the creation of works written in the spirit of Irish culture, as distinct from English culture. This style fed a growing Irish identity, which also found inspiration in Irish history, myths and folklore. There was an attempt to revitalize the native rhythm and music of Irish Gaelic. Figures such as Lady Gregory, WB Yeats, George Russell, J .M. Synge and Seán O'Casey wrote plays and articles about the political state of Ireland. Gaelic revival and Irish nationalism frequently overlapped in places such as An Stad, a tobacconist on Dublin’s North Frederick St
caption: Vases with Celtic motifs, c. 1900, Caneware with raised gilding, by Wedgwood.
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