Christy Brown

Biography

A self-portrait by Christy Brown, whose existence had long been unknown, was first shown to the public only in February 2025, at the Coach House Gallery in Dublin Castle. Beside it hung works by contemporary artists, among them Genieve Figgis, Elizabeth Peyton and Eva Rothschild. In January 2026 the painting appeared in the group exhibition “Songs to the Siren” at The Model in Sligo.

Brown has long been known as a writer, but he painted all his life.

He was born on 5 June 1932 at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, into a working-class Irish family. By one account, his parents, Bridget and Patrick Brown, had twenty-two children, nine of whom died in infancy. From 1924 the family lived in Kimmage, on Stannaway Road. The boy was found to have severe cerebral palsy: his limbs were almost entirely spastic. Doctors advised placing him in an institution; his parents refused and raised him at home, together with their other children.

In his teens a social worker, Katriona Delahunt, heard of him. She began visiting the family regularly and bringing books and paints, because the boy had a keen interest in art and literature. His left leg was the only part of his body he could control, and with it he learned to write and draw. He received almost no formal schooling, but attended St Brendan’s School-Clinic in Sandymount on and off. There he met the physician and author Robert Collis, who saw in him a natural novelist and later, using his own connections, helped to have “My Left Foot” published. This autobiographical account of life in Dublin appeared, it seems, only after many years of work on it.

When the book became a literary sensation, many readers wrote to Brown. Among them was a married American woman, Beth Moore. They corresponded, and in 1960 Brown travelled to North America and stayed with her in Connecticut. They met again in 1965. He returned to Connecticut to finish a large novel on which he had worked for years, and completed it in 1967, under a strict working regime that Moore helped to impose. “Down All the Days” was published in 1970, with the dedication: “For Beth, who with such gentle ferocity, finally whipped me into finishing this book...” The novel was translated into 14 languages. The Irish Times reviewer Bernard Share called it the most important Irish novel since “Ulysses”. Like Joyce, Brown wrote in stream of consciousness and sought to capture Dublin life through humour, accurate dialect and detailed portraits of characters. To my mind, the comparison with Joyce says more about the critic’s enthusiasm than about the book, but readers took it up.

His fame grew, and on returning to Ireland Brown used his earnings to build a specially designed house outside Dublin, where he settled with his sister’s family. In 1972 he married Mary Carr, an Englishwoman he had met at a party in London, at the Register Office in Dublin. They lived in Rathcoole, County Dublin, then in Ballyheigue, County Kerry, and finally in Somerset, in England. He went on painting and writing novels, poetry and plays. In 1974 came the novel “A Shadow on Summer”, based on his relationship with Beth Moore.

Besides “Down All the Days” he wrote the novels “Wild Grow the Lilies” (1976) and “A Promising Career” (published in 1982, after his death), and three collections of poetry: “Come Softly to My Wake”, “Background Music” and “Of Snails and Skylarks”. All the poems were later gathered in a single volume.

Brown died on 7 September 1981 at East Pennard, in Somerset, aged forty-nine. In 1989 the director Jim Sheridan, working from a screenplay by Shane Connaughton, made the film “My Left Foot”. Daniel Day-Lewis as Brown and Brenda Fricker as his mother won Academy Awards; the film itself was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.