At first glance, Daniel MacDonald’s painting The Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne 1847 seems pretty cheerful. A young man is flinging himself into the toss of a ball, his arm swung back and his feet off the ground. A crowd has gathered around him, eager to watch, perhaps waiting for a chance to play. But 1847 was not a happy year in Cloyne, Ireland; it fell in the middle of the country’s Great Famine, the result of a potato blight that caused about 1 million deaths in just a handful of years. With that in mind, the painting hits differently. The colors look gloomy, the sky a dingy yellow-gray. The onlookers no longer seem as jovial. A woman on the scene’s periphery, her ashen face poking out of a black hood, stares eerily at the viewer. Still, the bowling match seems to be keeping most of the people engaged—maybe even distracted, if only for a moment, from their hunger, their fear, the precarity of knowing they might need to join the surge of people fleeing …