— Brenan, Painter
(fl. c. 1750)
Painter
From A Dictionary of Irish Artists 1913
He appears to have been working as an artist in Dublin in the middle of the eighteenth century; but nothing is known of him except that he was the author of "The Painter's Breakfast, a Dramatic Satyr, by Mr. Brenan," 12mo., published in Dublin in 1756. This, a cleverly written work, is directed against would-be connoisseurs of art, whom it ridicules with considerable humour in their neglect of modern work and their worship of the antique. "The inundation of ill pictures," says the author, "imported by knaves with a design to impose on the tasteless and unwary, has quite sapped the foundation of our art." Pallat, a painter, invites to breakfast various connoisseurs and patrons of art, and succeeds in selling, as choice examples of old masters, a lot of worthless rubbish. The profits of the sale were designed to be devoted to the relief of lunatics.