The end of the world was not calm when the sixth seal was opened in the Book of Revelation. The sun turned black, the moon reddened, the heavens collapsed, and cities crumbled as humanity recoiled in fear. The Opening of the Sixth Seal, painted by Irish artist Francis Danby in 1826 and now held in the National Gallery of Ireland, displays this biblical scene in a vast, dramatic oil painting. At first glance, the work seems to be a romantic vision of divine judgement and human insignificance; figures couch with terror, and a king slumps beside his fallen crown and scepter. Yet, near the center of the composition stands a formerly enslaved man, now upright and liberated, with his shackles slipping from his wrists. Indeed, this moral confrontation is Danby’s primary focus, not the portrayal of biblical reckoning.
From its first exhibition, The Opening of the Sixth Seal was a symbol of resistance. Painted at a moment when the British slave trade was outlawed, but slavery itself continued, Danby’s work advocated for abolition, causing the painting to be received as scandalous. His political message provoked such outrage that someone attempted to cut the enslaved figure from the canvas. Although the canvas was repaired, the knife marks left behind are still visible today; the indentations testify to the power of art as a form of resistance. From exposing normalised injustice to preserving historical truth from being rewritten, art resists in many ways.
The tradition of resistant art is featured heavily throughout Irish history. In the early twentieth century, Irish painter Jack B. Yeats developed his art as a form of resistance. His painting Bachelor’s Walk, In Memory, commemorates the killing of four unarmed civilians by British soldiers in Dublin in 1914. It shows a woman placing a flower at the site of the shootings and a barefoot boy gazing across a river, focusing on quiet acts of remembrance and maintaining the dignity of civilians and their grief. Remembering history itself becomes an act of resistance against imperial narratives. The Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century also undermined British cultural dominance by rebuilding Irish identity. At a time when the Irish language and traditions were being suppressed, the renewal of myth, literature, and poetry resisted colonial rule.
The stakes of artistic resistance can be seen across the world and became far more explicit in Europe during the Second World War. Under the Nazi regime, art was aggressively policed as a threat to political and cultural control. Many artists whose works were not realistic and idealistic did not conform to Nazi ideology and were consequently banned from professional organisations, forced into exile, and murdered. In 1937, thousands of artworks were taken from German museums and displayed in the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. Avant-garde works, such as Cubism and Expressionism, were labeled “degenerate”. Many German artists and schools now regarded as pioneers of modern art, such as Georg Kolbe, Paul Klee, and Der Blaue Reiter, and foreign artists such as Picasso and Chagall, were considered mentally ill, and their works subversive and therefore threatening. The pieces in the exhibition were intentionally crowded, mislabeled, and unframed to humiliate the artists and their ideas. The fact that the regime felt compelled to condemn and control the works shows how threatening art was perceived to be. Ironically, despite the exhibition’s intent to spread propaganda, out of the millions who viewed it, some may have resonated with the messages challenging Nazi ideology and inspired resistance.
History shows that as cultural and political hegemonies rely on silence and omission, art intervenes at these moments by preserving memory, and as current political oppression persists, art remains a crucial site of resistance.
In contemporary Palestinian art, for example, the olive tree has emerged as a familiar symbol of resistance. For centuries, cultivating olives sustained Palestinian families economically. Today, thousands still depend on olives, even as olive groves are frequently uprooted and destroyed during land seizures and settler attacks, especially in the West Bank. Yet, Palestinian artists repeatedly return to the steadfast olive tree as an image of resilience and strength. Painter, sculptor, and cartoonist Sliman Mansour focuses on the theme of land and earth in his paintings of peasants and daily life in Palestine, often using media like mud and henna in his work.
As Mansour notes, the olive tree’s deep roots represent the endurance of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation. Other contemporary artists, like photographer Rula Halawani and painter and animator Nabil Abughanima, also focus their work on everyday Palestinian life; their works are displayed in galleries in both Cork and Dublin.
Art resists in countless forms; Danby brought light to injustice at the end of the world, and other pieces preserve memory and identity where there is marginalisation. Art does not resolve injustice, but ensures that what happened cannot be forgotten.
