Donegal carpets, produced during the later nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, represent the Irish contribution to the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau Movements. Richly colored and beautifully drawn, they may have a contemporary Art Nouveau emphasis, or, alternatively they may look back to the great past of early medieval Irish art like the Book of Kells or the Tara Brooch. At times they combined both these sensibilities to produce one of the more distinctive European decorative idioms of this period.
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