Great work tends to announce itself even without the benefit of hype. Many moons ago, when Paul Finucane was involved in setting up the medical school at the University of Limerick, in 2007, he and his colleagues decided to establish a collection of medicine-related art for the benefit of students at the college.

“I came across a painting called Embryo with Gas Mask at an auction house,” Finucane says. A provocative piece, the work had been used, with its artist’s permission, on an anti-nuclear-power poster in the 1970s. “It’s the notion of an embryo needing to be protected from the environment by having a gas mask,” Finucane says. “While it’s a challenging image, there’s no question about the quality of the draughtsmanship.”

Its creator’s name was Donal O’Sullivan. Finucane, a keen collector as well as founding dean of the school of medicine, embarked on a little detective work to learn more about him. This obscure artist, he discovered, had been prolific in the 1970s and 1980s. Based in Dublin, he had gone against the expressionism that was fashionable in Irish art circles at the time, trading instead in powerful, elegant and melancholy figurative art that often discomfited its viewers.

A prize winner and college activist, O’Sullivan had been a mover and shaker in his early life; at one point he appeared in the front row of the audience of The Late Late Show to protest against inadequate facilities at the National College of Art, resulting in important reforms. Then mental-health frailties set in. O’Sullivan died by suicide in 1991, aged just 46. In subsequent decades, he was largely forgotten by the art world, his work left to gather dust.