At midcentury Irish painting was at a crossroads. Irish painters were taking different paths. The art of Colin Middleton, for example, drew its strength from a sense of postwar angst and a flirtation with the unsettling emotional world of surrealism. Like Middleton, Patrick Hennessy, in works such as Exiles of 1943, merges an air of mysticism with allusions to the continuing legacy of emigration and its deep fissures in Irish society.

Exile and alienation seem almost natural states for Irish artists at midcentury. Dan O'Neill's 1952 painting Birth honors the role of women in Irish society, yet it also suggests an oppressive scene in which life itself is squeezed and forlorn. When Irish subject matter appears, as in Nano Reid's Tinkers at Slieve Breagh, it often identifies with rural poverty. Cumulatively, such works addressed the entrenched poverty in Ireland at midcentury, as artists saw their country being left behind by a general postwar European economic recovery.