Inside the quirky Cork home of the late great self-taught artist Tadhg McSweeney

Tadhg McSweeney’s art, of ‘sophisticated simplicity’, was under-recognised during his lifetime. That is set to change after he bequeathed his property and artworks to his local Cork community, which plans to showcase his paintings and convert the house, itself a work of art, into an artists’ retreat, writes Pet O’Connell

Annie Murphy and Mary Jordan, directors of the Tadhg McSweeney trust with some of his work. Picture; Eddie O'Hare

“Tadhg McSweeney has a sophisticated simplicity in his approach to the visual world that I would call reverence,” says Irish visual artist Alice Maher.

McSweeney, who passed away in 2018, employed “no flourishes or adornments, no extra brushstrokes, no showing-off in the way he paints, just a distilled purity of image that is very hard to achieve in a world full of noise and activity”.