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A major print exhibition highlights the life and
works of Lafcadio Hearn, Ireland’s most important literary outsider. unning at Farmleigh Gallery until the end of August 2025 is Kwaidan – Encounters With Lafcadio Hearn, an exhibition WORDS Kieran Owens of contemporary fine art prints by twenty Irish and twenty Japanese artists, whose works represent their individual response to Kwaidan, the Greek-born Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn’s collection of strange and wonderful Japanese ghost stories. The book was first published in 1904, the year of Hearn’s death, in Tokyo, at the age of 54. Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefcada, to Charles Bush Hearn, an Irish Surgeon-Major in the British army, and Rosa Cassimati, his Greek mother. Charles’ branch of the Hearn family hailed from the townland of Correagh, near Kilbeggan in Co. Westmeath. An Anglo-Irish Protestant family, Lafcadio’s great-great-grandfather, the Reverend Daniel Hearn (1693-1766), was the Archdeacon of Cashel and Rector of St. Anne’s Church, on Dublin’s Dawson Street, where he is buried in its crypt. Charles Bush Hearn and Rosa Casimatti married in the village of Santa Maura, on the Ionian island of Lefcada, in November 1849, and their surviving second son was born there on the 27th June 1850. The future author was baptised Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, his middle name reflecting the name of the place of his birth. When Lafcadio was just two years old, he was brought to Dublin by his mother Rosa, through arrangements made by his uncle, Richard Holmes Hearn, a painter of some note who resided in Paris for most of his adult life. Rosa received a poor reception from her new Irish family connections, partly due to her religious convictions and partly to do with not speaking any English, and she soon returned to Greece alone, never to be seen again by her son. Lafcadio’s parents eventually divorced, following which his father remarried in Dublin 1857, starting a new family of three daughters, though one with which the young boy would have no involvement during his early life. Having last been seen by Lafcadio on the beach at Tramore, when he was just seven years old, Surgeon Major Hearn would eventually die onboard the steamship Mula in the seaport of Suez, in Egypt, in November 1866, when Lafcadio was sixteen years old. His legal affairs were sorted out by his brother Richard, though in none of the resulting settlements was Lafcadio mentioned. Having effectively been abandoned by his parents, Lafcadio was raised in Dublin until his early teen years, during which time he spent summers with his great-aunt Mrs. Sarah Brenane in Tramore, Co. Waterford, and with other Elwood relations in Cong, Co. Mayo. Mrs. Brenane was a convert to the Catholic faith and through her financial support, the young Lafcadio was sent to Ushaw College, a boarding seminary school in Durham, England. His time here was a miserable one, compounded by an accident that occurred during a game where he lost the use of his left eye, resulting in a disfigurement that would trouble him for the rest of his life. Through his upbringing in Dublin and his school years at Ushaw, he developed 39