Jeanne Sheehy, who has died at the age of 60, was one of Ireland's most distinguished and important cultural historians of the 19th century. Her family background - her mother, Anna, was a talented illustrator and her father, Edward, was one of the most influential Irish critics of the 1940s and 1950s - fitted her for her chosen career.
She was educated at Dominican Convent Eccles Street, where she studied through the medium of Irish, and University College, Dublin, where she took her primary degree in modern languages. She went on to study at TCD for an M.Litt in fine arts under Prof Anne Crookshank, working on the career of the painter Walter Osborne, as well as studying art history at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, the city where she used to boast that she had been conceived. Her first appointment was as research assistant to Cyril Barrett SJ, on the fine arts components of the New History of Ireland.
The first major milestone in her career came with the publication of her ground-breaking account of Osborne in 1974, and she went on to curate an important exhibition of his works at the National Gallery and the Ulster Museum in 1983-1984. Meanwhile she published a significant account of the Gothic Revival in Ireland and was co-author with Homan Potterton and Peter Harbison of Irish Art and Architecture (1978).
These studies were leading her towards her masterwork, The Rediscovery of Ireland's Past: the Celtic Revival 1830-1930 which was published to enormous acclaim in 1980. It would be reasonable to say that Jeanne Sheehy was responsible, alongside fellow scholars like Barrett and Etienne Rynne, for creating an awareness of the visual element in the 19th century search for Irish identity, which had been available to only a few scholars up to that point.
However, she would never allow sentiment or wishful thinking to get in the way of the truth, and her work on the Celtic Revival is a salutary lesson in how to pursue scholarship without placing it in the unquestioning hands of nationalism. While recognising the ambition of Young Ireland to create a sense of national identity, and celebrating the individual achievements of the Revival, she quietly insisted that "national styles are not created by acts of will".
From 1975 she taught at the Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University), becoming principal lecturer in art history in 1983. Here, her teaching commitments largely prevented her from further major writing projects. Described by one colleague as "a wickedly charming hostess and a dangerously good cook", she continued, despite serious illness, her celebration of life with family, friends and colleagues.
Jeanne Sheehy: born 1939; died September, 1999