Armagh County Museum opened in 1937 in what was originally an 1830s school. The Honorary Curator was local historian George (‘T.G.F.’) Paterson, who added to the collection artworks by a number of Irish artists, especially local landscapes and portraits of people who lived and worked in the county. Paterson persuaded many of the contemporaries of Lurgan-born polymath "Æ"(George Russell) to donate paintings by the poet and mystic, and the collection is now one of the largest in Ireland. When Belfast-based artist John Luke moved to County Armagh to escape the blitz Paterson commissioned him to paint a local scene for the museum's developing art collection. The Old Callan Bridge (1945) is one of the museum's treasures.