This Madmen of Art Monday series honors the great Madmen of Irish Art—the ones who were too bold, too wild, too brilliant to stay within the lines. We love to hate them and hate to love them, these devils of inspiration who could bring us to our knees.

The Irish are known for their poets and their pugilists, their saints and their sinners, their whiskey-soaked laments and their riotous reels. They are the lords of contradiction—a conundrum like their intricate, continuous patterns of Celtic knots, with no obvious beginnings nor logical ends.