You are welcome to meet the staff at the Academy and see for yourself the high standards achieved by the students.

The Dony Mac Manus Studios has been founded to address the figurative artistic needs of those living in Florence. It focuses on the human figure with the understanding that it is the most expressive vehicle in which to express the human condition. The curriculum is based on the academic principals of the 19th Century academies in France as a foundation in seeing. Once the students have learnt to see they are then able to interpret what they see by making informed visual decisions as opposed to uninformed abstraction. This is based on the idea that one cannot break the rules unless one knows what they are and it is only until one knows the rules, that one can break them properly.

At the Studios the emphasis is on figure structure and anatomical accuracy that is essential for the rendering of the human figure with power and conviction.

The Dony Mac Manus Studios has been running programmes in figurative drawing, sculpting and painting and celebrated its first birthday by exhibiting the work of friends, faculty and students.

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Above: Thomas Ryan, past President of the Royal Hibernian Academy and Dony Mac Manus, founder.

The exhibition was opened by Tom Ryan PPRHA

Thomas Ryan attended the Limerick School of Art, then the National College of art in Dublin, where he studied under Seán Keating and Maurice MacGonigal. He has had many portrait commissions and he is also well known for his historical scenes and for his sensitive still-life paintings. His portrait of T.K.Whitaker hangs in the National Gallery. He has exhibited in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin and was president of the RHA from 1982 to 1993.