This dramatic eviction scene has so many similarities to The Discovery of the Potato Blight in Ireland that it too is almost certainly by Daniel MacDonald, and was probably also exhibited in London. Set in the same romantic landscape, it features a similar despairing family facing a grim future. Three generations are again represented, in the same vein of sentimentality, including a sweet child and a dog. Like the old man in Discovery, the woman with the infants looks imploringly to heaven, while the other young woman, with the bowed dark head, has an almost exact counterpart in the other painting. The knee breeches and hose of the husband in Discovery are depicted in the same way on the man on the right of this picture.

Evictions had long been an emotive feature of Irish life, reflecting the most abrasive aspects of landlord-tenant relations. They increased dramatically during the Famine, as tenants were increasingly unable to pay rent and landlords were desperate to maintain their income. Many landlords, indeed, exploited the situation to clear their estates of the myriad small holdings that had devoloped through subdivision as the population grew. This increase was a factor in the development of a very negative image of the Irish landlord in English public opinion. The Famine was blamed on their greed and incompetence, and this was reflected in the images accompanying famine stories in papers such as the Illustrated London News, which, in 1848, for example, published a graphic picture of an eviction. This featured a disraught young couple pleading in vain with their landlord, mounted on a fine horse, while his agents drive off the couple´s animals, throw their possessions out of their little cabin, and remove the roof, while a detachment of soldiers look on.

MacDonald depicts a less crowded scene, and again utilises the conventions of Victorian narrative painting to appeal to the sympathy of the English viewer. The well-dressed landlord, or his agent, demands the key to the poor man´s little cabin with its disintegrating thatched roof, while two armed soldiers (or possibly members of the military-style constabulary, whose barracks had become a feature of the Irish rural landscape during the previous two decades) look on. The tenant, a heroic figure, holds onto his spade, pointing to his uncertain future as a spailpín or labourer. In the left foreground, the family´s few possessions have been thrown out, some of them broken in the process. Beside the cabin are the distinctive lazy-beds in which the Irish poor grew their potatoes – a rare example of tillage, albeit of a primitive kind, being depicted in Irish art in this period. While the tenant offers no resistance, the man on the right of the picture, with his hand inside his waistcoat, possibly feeling for a weapon, seems to gesture towards the agrarian violence with which such distressing scenes were often met.

Tom Dunne