For even culturally well-informed people, Irish art got no further than the Book of Kells more than a millennium ago. It is something which never happened, a historico-cultural non-event. Irish literature in the past century has gained a world hearing, from Yeats to Seamus Heaney; Irish painting and Irish sculpture are known only to a minority of scholars and cognoscenti, museum curators and a handful of salesroom addicts. And even these few rarely have any overall view or "picture" of Irish art and its line of development. Its entire history and pedigree are elements which they have never considered. Their knowledge, as a rule, is piecemeal and arbitrary; they know isolated names, certain individual works, but lack any overall art-historical context in which to fit them.

It is still possible to go through the pages of quite prestigious art encyclopedias without finding an entry for a single Irish artist (I have even found some which ignore Ireland's greatest painter, Jack Yeats). Accepted ideas - which is a polite term for officially approved clichÈs - take root slowly, but when they do, they root deeply and stubbornly. They derive their strength from the fact that nobody has thought about them much, let alone bothered to question or analyse them, and through this lack of any real debate or weight of intelligent opinion on the subject, they pass from word of-mouth consensus into something like textbook authority.

As the Bellman says in The Hunting of the Snark, "what I tell you three times is true"; and the Irish have been told so often that they have no real tradition of visual art that for the most part they have accepted this without query or looking into the matter. As for other countries, they have scarcely considered the issue at all; for them - Americans and Continentals in particular - Ireland is the country of James Joyce, Yeats, Beckett and a few other writers with a world reputation. And, of course, the IRA - that and nothing else.

A major chink in this curtain of ignorance and misinformation came with the massive exhibition of Post-Impressionism at Burlington House in London in 1979-80, in which Irish artists the Yeatses father and son, Osborne, Orpen and Roderic O'Conor - were prominently featured. It showed that Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century had no lack of painters or real quality, even if they could somehow be fitted into the role of British offshoots and tributaries. And even more recently, the renewal of interest in Jack Yeats has gathered considerable momentum. Yet memories are short, and of the thousands who recently attended the Yeats exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, how many knew of his inclusion in the Armory Show of 1913 which virtually launched Modernism in America; the retrospective show of his work organised in London in 1948; and the admiration of people as contrasting as Kenneth Clark and Kokoschka not to mention the award of the Legion of Honour by France? How many people realise the world fame (no exaggeration) of Orpen and Lavery in their lifetimes, or could cite the praise of Danby by Theophile Gautier and of Maclise by Baudelaire? How many Londoners, passing daily by the Victoria and Albert Memorial (admittedly, not one of the highest peaks of nineteenth-century art) know that a central figure in its creation was an Irishman, John Foley? And of the thousands of sightseers, both British and foreign, who file through the Throne Room of the House of Lords, how many realise that its murals are the work of another Irishman, Daniel Maclise?

Nowhere is the prejudice against Ireland's visual arts more entrenched than in literary circles and literary histories, which give full credit to the achievements of the Literary Revival but treat the Irish artists of the period as though they were provincial figures. It has been said, ad nauseam, that Ireland produced nothing in the other arts to equal what the writers did; yet anybody with eyes in his or her head, who has made even a superficial study of the period, will know that virtually the opposite is true. The Literary Revival was the period in which Hone and Osborne, Orpen and Lavery, and a number of very gifted sculptors were active and creative; when Ireland produced a school of stained-glass artists who were possibly the best in the world at that time; the age when John Butler Yeats proved himself probably the finest portrait painter in the English-speaking world; when Jack Yeats, his even more gifted son, began to emerge as an artist of European size. It was, in fact, a golden age in Irish art, and the crafts enjoyed a parallel renaissance.

This was fully realised by many or most of the literary men themselves, as can be proved by the references scattered through the writings of George Moore, Yeats (the poet, not the painter), "AE" (George Russell) and others. The Irish renaissance was never a hothouse, purely literary affair; it embraced all the arts (except, possibly, architecture) and these arts cross-fertilised each other. Neither was Irish painting "literary" - in fact, rather the reverse was true, since the leading writers were mostly steeped in visual culture. This fact is usually overlooked, yet even a superficial study will show that it is an obvious facet of the entire Literary Revival. First of all, there is Yeats himself, son of an excellent painter and brother of another, who even began himself with similar ambitions. The part which painting, from Samuel Palmer and the Pre-Raphaelites to Gustave Moreau, played in forming his imagination needs no underlining to those who know his work and have read any competent biography-study of him. George Moore, too, began with ambitions to succeed as a painter and has chronicled his failure and his conversion to novel-writing both in his Hail and Farewell trilogy and in the earlier Confessions of a Young Man. At least he had the consolation of becoming a leading art critic, who played a central role in introducing the French Impressionists to England. Edith Somerville, co-author with her cousin Violet Martin of the Irish RM. stories and of what some critics reckon to be the finest Irish novel, The Real Charlotte, studied art in Paris and was a painter and illustrator of real talent. "AE" also began as a painter and if he had treated his painting as more than an avocation, he might have become Ireland's sole Symbolist artist of stature, apart from Harry Clarke. In short, almost all the great figures of the Literary Revival were essentially visuels. With Joyce, a total change of orientation occurs, since Joyce seems to have possessed very little visual sense and in later life went almost blind, though in Paris he was contemporary with the greatest age of art since the Renaissance. (My late friend Arthur Power, who was both an accomplished writer and a gifted painter, often told me that in Paris he repeatedly tried to interest Joyce in the works of Picasso, Matisse, and their contemporaries but could never get any response apart from the lacklustre "how much are they worth?") Where his immediate predecessors had been visuels, Joyce lived primarily through his ear - he was of course highly musical, with a fine singing voice, and his Dublin dialogue is notated with the precision of a musical score, even down to the "rests". It goes without saying that the enormous international fame of Joyce, especially in America where his writings have found a second home, has done a great deal to shape the standard image of Irish culture abroad. The Irish are registered as the race with the gift of the gab, a blessing and a curse in one. This image, or shall we call it simply prejudice, has coloured apprehension of Irish literature and art all over the globe.