'A Time & a Place: Two centuries of Irish social life' focuses, through the art of their time, on Irish people engaged in recreational activities across the last two centuries. The book is arranged thematically, covering areas and subjects such as sport, music and dance, visits to the beach, religious observance and pilgrimage, theatre, circus, calendar customs, fairs and markets, pubs, clubs and parades. The aim is to investigate the lives of Irish people away from work and to celebrate the richness and diversity of Irish society across class, community, geography and generation, as recorded by some of the finest artists practising in the country. It will bring together works by some of Ireland's most accomplished figurative painters of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Richard Brydges Beechey, William Conor, William van der Hagen, Paul Henry, Sean Keating, Harry Kernoff, Charles Lamb, John Lavery, Richard Thomas Moynan, James Arthur O'Connor, William Osborne, Joseph Tudor and Jack B. Yeats. The pictures are drawn from a large number of private and public collections, as well as from the National Gallery of Ireland's own collection. 100 colour illustrations