A BOOK detailing the life of one of Limerick’s most significant cultural figures of the 20th century has been launched.
‘John Hunt – The Man, The Medievalist, The Connoisseur’ was written by Brian O’Connell and tells the story of the man behind the city’s Hunt Museum, the restoration fo the world-famous Bunratty Castle and the creation of both the prehistoric folk park at Craggaunowen and Lough Gur visitor centres.
John Hunt (1900–1976) was a British born historian, antiquarian, and collector. Together with his German wife Putzel, he amassed the collection that today forms the basis of Limerick city’s main museum. The Hunt collection, with an estimated value of €70 million, is one of the world’s largest private collections of art and artefacts and was donated to the State by John Hunt and family a year before his death. He was Sotheby’s principal advisor on medieval art for two decades and helped to shape the medieval art collections of world famous museums including the V&A in London to the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Controversy erupted in 2004 when France’s Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which tracks down former Nazis, wrote to President Mary McAleese alleging the late couple had links to Nazi art dealers of which following an exhaustive Royal Irish Academy investigation in 2007, they were unequivocally cleared.
Mr O’Connell, who is a former chairman of the Shannon Heritage and a member of the Hunt Museums Trust, said: “The book is on many levels a series of improbable love stories – the love story of two very different, but inseparable, life partners, John and Putzel Hunt, their mutual passion for rare and unappreciated art treasures created by skilled craftsmen from the so-called Dark Ages but most of all the love affair between the Hunts and their adopted homeland of Ireland.”
