The middles classes, particularly, preferred to escape into the homes, furnishings and lifestyles of the wealthy classes. For instance, an auction of a big house and its contents still holds more fascination for the press and public today than that of an ordinary homestead.

Whether born of an inferiority complex or an innate snobbery, even art historians preferred to focus on the finest art with the highest value.

Now art historian Claudia Kinmonth has put an end to all that with Irish Rural Interiors in Art, her just-published book guaranteed to give the Irish a sense of themselves through paintings which reflect their homes and customs.

There are paintings showing life around the hearth, the objects you might find on dressers, women at work and play, beds and ways of sleeping, weddings and wakes, pubs and shops, holy days and holidays and health and education.

Many of the customs and the objects used in the daily lives of ordinary people were lost to the public until now. Through the pictures you can see the way the Irish lived coming into focus.

This isn't the first time that Kinmonth has tapped into our long-lost culture.

She did it with Irish Country Furniture in 1993 when she found Irish furniture and photographed it in the settings for which it had been made and interviewed the makers and owners of the furniture, thus presenting largely unknown material in danger of extinction.

Kinmonth believes that traditionally historians have looked at the aristocracy to explain society rather than at the common people. When observing the lives of ordinary people, Kinmonth herself has always preferred to look at how they lived, loved, slept and died, and how they used the objects around them, rather than just state what the name of a designer and a manufacturer was. In paintings she analyses the context of the scene, tells stories and takes the reader through all the paintings in her book.She can find a society's entire cultural heritage in just one painting.

Take, for example, Bandon artist Charles H Cook's painting 'St Patrick's Day 1867', which had languished dirty and unseen on the floor of a store room in the National Library until Kinmonth brought it to life, first by organising funds to clean it and then by researching what was happening in the painting.

The painting is highly symbolic and its narrative can be read through the symbols. It reveals a story of pub-life, love, taboo and emigration.

It shows a back room in a pub where people are drinking and carousing and where a man plays an uileann pipe. The men are wearing shamrock in their hats. A debonair soldier in a red jacket is dancing with a young woman and when the narrative of the picture is decoded it is clear that this young couple are the centre of the story.

There are symbols everywhere. Kinmonth says the flowers scattered in the foreground of the picture have a language of their own. The primroses symbolise innocence and daisies youth. There is also a basket containing dead fowl, symbolising a kind of deflowering.

A male mallard duck (the soldier) is placed on top of a Rhode Island hen (the young woman), whose colour is the same as the girl's dress.

Other symbols of loss of virtue and innocence are the empty bird cage and the empty velvet-lined jewellery box. The unlit candle symbolises man's darker side. There is also an empty bottle suggesting that perhaps the young couple have been unwise.

In general, the liaison between the young couple is considered unwise . . . you can see the looks of curiosity, intrigue and, in one case, horror on the faces of the onlookers in the pub.

Ordinarily, this young woman should have an arranged marriage and this flirtation with the soldier is considered irregular.

There are other indications of what was going on at the time. The painting within the painting of an Erskine Nicol work indicates that emigration was the order of the day . . . a figure with a shillelagh over his shoulder is perusing a poster for the Shamrock Line to New York and Quebec, with the Dublin docks in the background.

Many of the paintings in Kinmonth's book show that we once had our now diminishing legendary Irish hospitality. Many of the artists who created the paintings were on its receiving end.

?An increasing number of women artists and writers ventured for inspiration into Connemara in the late 19th century, " she says in the introduction.

?Beyond reach of hotels, or lost on rough roads, their descriptions of domestic arrangements when they were welcomed into farmhouse bedrooms are revealingly detailed."

You might say that it took an Englishwoman to address the imbalance of, or at least bring attention to, our Irish genre furniture and painting. But Claudia Kinmonth considers herself Irish and has always wanted to live in Ireland.

She began visiting her grandparents in West Cork as a child and her wish came true eight years ago when she set up home with her husband in Lep in West Cork. She lives there now with him and her two children, Ewan and Finbarr.

Born in London, she studied at The Royal College of Art and, founded on inspiration from her holidays in West Cork, she did her thesis on Irish country furniture and she did it so well that she won an award of £7,000 to turn her work into a booklet, which became Irish Country Furniture 1700- 1950.

The launch of her book at the Crawford Gallery in Cork on 4 May is accompanied by an exhibition of 40 works from the book as well as other genre paintings of Irish rural life and landscape.

Kinmonth says it's the first exhibition of Irish genre painting to be held in Ireland.

The National Gallery had a Dutch one and intend to have an Irish one but nobody has focused on Irish genre painting until now.