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"Ireland Map with County Meath Magnified" Map representing the home place of Irish artist Simon Coleman.

Later Life and Death

Simon Coleman continued to work as an artist into his later life after finishing his traveling with the Irish Folklore Commission for the third time in 1959. The art that Coleman created consisted of many different styles and mediums such as watercolour and oil paintings, drawings and sketches, as well as pieces of writing. He had been commissioned once in 1949 and twice in 1959 to create visual documentation of the historical findings from the journeys to Donegal, Galway and Clare. While working with the Irish Folklore Commission Coleman kept notebooks that he treated in a diary like fashion to take notes on what he was observing as well as some of the stories he collected and had been told along the way. The storytellers he encountered throughout his life often became the subjects of some of the portraits he created. These diaries that he kept while on his three trips were consistently used later in his life by the Irish Folklore Commission to identify and trace records up to their findings and reports. Simon Coleman’s first exhibition that his artwork was part of was held in the Royal Hibernian Academy and over the next 50 years of his working and later life over 200 pieces of his artworks were used for in exhibitions there. Coleman had relocated to Dublin to study art at the RHA but he later moved back to Co. Meath to teach art in the Drogheda Technical School and remained living based out of Meath for the remainder of his life. In his home county of Meath in the town of Stamullen, Simon Coleman died on the 17^th of February in 1995 at the age of 78.