An exhibition of the first colour photographs taken in Ireland was launched last night in Dublin.
In search of Ireland 1913 features 50 images taken by two French women, Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon-Alba, as part of a global project to record life at the beginning of the 20th century.
The women used then newly available autochrome colour plates to record their two-month journey around Ireland.
The images include scenes from Connemara, Galway city, Athlone, Glendalough, Drogheda and the Boyne Valley. They capture a people described by Yeats as adding "prayer to shivering prayer". Each picture is captioned with extracts from the women's travel diary.
The whole project was the idea of French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn, who attempted to compile a "photographic inventory of the earth as it was occupied and organised by man at the beginning of the 20th century".
Between 1909 and 1931, he sent photographers to 50 countries where political and social change was under way, to record the disappearing world. Mespoulet and Mignon-Alba were the only women on the project.
The photographs have been lent to the National Photographic Archive in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, by the Musée Albert Kahn in Paris.
The exhibition, which will run until January, was launched by the French ambassador to Ireland, His Excellency Monsieur Yvon Roe D'Albert.
