ABSTRACT
Irish landscape art and Seán Keating’s works in particular lend themselves to the study of the relationship between the Irish land and its people. In this chapter, I argue that through the representation of ageing male bodies, the painter reclaims the Irish land for Irish men. Based on metaphor theories developed by Lakoff and Johnson, I demonstrate that both the technique and the subject matter selected by Keating result in constructions of old age and masculinity as metaphors of an ancient claim to the land, thanks to which these paintings can be interpreted as facilitating the decolonisation of Irish identity.
