From the outside, Aisling Gallery and Framing looks like just another comfortable home in Hingham. But after you walk past the flock of sheep statues in the front yard, up the front steps with a US flag on one side and an Irish flag on the other, and step through the front door, you feel as if you’ve been transported across the Atlantic Ocean.

The walls inside 229 Lincoln Street feature the works of Irish artists like Vincent Crotty and Arthur O’Callaghan that frame the shelves of a wide selection of Irish gifts. Between scenic landscape paintings and portraits, you see authentic Irish knit sweaters, woolen blankets, tweed caps, treasured old books, and Celtic jewelry.

Maureen Rohan Connolly has run the art gallery and frame shop since 1989, but her journey to opening day long precedes that. Born in Ireland in 1939, Maureen spent the first two decades of her life in scenic Castlegregory, Co. Kerry, with her parents, twin sister Teresa, and three brothers.

“We grew up in a very small village with about 200 people. It was very simple,” said Maureen. “We had a small farm, and my father planted all the potatoes, carrots, and vegetables, and there was really no money. We got chicken and pigs. My mother would trade eggs for sugar, tea, and so forth. We made our own butter.”

She added, “It was a very simple life, and we didn’t appreciate it really until we came to America, and then we missed it so much.”

But it was the glitz they associated with the United States that moved Maureen and Teresa to cross the sea in the first place. “My mother’s sister, who lived in Roslindale, came home to visit, and she had lovely clothes and a camera and everything,” Maureen said. “I think we saw how amazing life can be in America. You can have all kinds of glamor.”

The twins left home for the first time two weeks shy of their 21st birthday and arrived in Boston in October 1960. “My sister and I were the only two girls in the family with three brothers, we decided to come, and my mother was heartbroken,” Maureen recalled, noting that they  promised their mother they would be gone for two years max.

“When we moved to the US, it was such a shock,” she said with a laugh. “We couldn’t believe it. There was so much traffic, and coming out through the tunnel, we thought it would cave in on us.”

From Logan Airport, they headed to Roslindale, where they had a small basement unit to move into. Maureen said that to her and her sister, it was “like living in the Ritz.”

In time, new jobs came into the picture, as did new friends. “We said we’d stay for two years," said Maureen, “but then my sister met her husband, John Brady and they married two years later. That was the end of going back.”

Not long after, it was Maureen’s turn for love. “We met at an Irish dance in Roxbury, at Hibernian Hall,” said Maureen, speaking of John Connolly. “I met him there, and then I kept bumping into him, and then we ended up getting married in ’69.

“My husband grew up in Dorchester. Both his parents are from Ireland; his father was from Galway, and his mother was from Sligo,” she noted.

John is “OFD”- Originally from Dorchester. He grew up in St Leo’s parish near Franklin Field. A 1959 graduate of Boston College, he had a career with the MBTA before he retired and teamed up with Maureen in establishing the gallery.

In time, the couple moved to Hingham, where Maureen worked in real estate and John kept things moving on the T. They added two daughters to their family, Siobhan and Deirdre, who gave them four grandchildren.

When John retired and Maureen left her job in real estate, the Connollys started out a new adventure: keeping Irish culture alive and well in Hingham. “There was a gallery in my village in Castlegregory,” said Maureen. “These two English ladies had a gallery, and they asked if they could sell the art in the US, and then John decided we would open a gallery. We knew nothing about art, and it’s a good thing we didn’t. If we knew anything, we probably wouldn’t have opened it. But it worked out well at the end. We love being at the gallery.”

In the early days, in addition to presentation and sales, the shop offered Irish literature and history classes. Nowadays, they host events for the Éire Society of Boston and host a St. Patrick’s Day party every March.

Maureen described their now 37-year-old enterprise as small, with wonderful, loyal customers. “It’s all word of mouth,” she said. “We have people who recommend us to other people. They keep coming back, and their children come back. We have wonderful people from Weymouth, Scituate, Cohasset, Duxbury, and Boston.”

One of the gallery’s most popular artists is Irish-born Vincent Crotty, who is well known today for his landscapes, seascapes, nocturnes, and figurative paintings. “Vincent was really one of our first featured artists,” said Maureen. “He came to Boston in 1990 and came down here with some of his art in a plastic bag, and he was trying to get his career going as an artist."

Crotty, in his early 20s at the time, recalled that experience. “I initially thought I was coming for a few months,” he said. “Obviously that didn’t pan out like that. I was here maybe a few weeks, and people started saying, ‘Did you know there is an Irish gallery opening in Hingham?’ and everybody kind of suggested that I connect with that gallery.”

By that point, Crotty had already completed more than a dozen paintings. “I brought them down in a black rubbish bag," he said. “I had to get two buses to Aisling Gallery, and I was young and kind of a little bit green.

“I walked in the door, and I was greeted by John and Maureen very warmly. And they liked my paintings. They said, ‘We’ll frame them, and we’ll put them up and sell them for you.’ John pulled out $100, and he said, ‘Go and buy some art materials.’ It just started there.”

He added, “Within a few weeks, Maureen started calling me, saying, ‘We just sold another painting.’ She really, really changed my life. John was very fatherly toward me, and Maureen couldn’t have been warmer. She expressed a strong belief in my work to her customers. Without her, I think I would’ve slipped through the cracks.”

Aisling Gallery manager Kimber Edwards, who has worked at the gallery since 2008, offered her take on Maureen, calling her “a very bright lady. She’s very quick. She’s way quicker than I am. I think she was the one who said, ‘We should add framing to this, otherwise we’ll go under in a year.’. She knows what she’s doing. She’s way quicker than she lets on.”

Added Edwards: “We’re able to talk and joke around, but we also work pretty well together. We can bounce ideas off each other. It works really well in a way that I have to do the specialties and make frames, and Maureen finishes everything up because when I do the finishing work, I’m really slow.”

Boston Irish Magazine Publisher Ed Forry offered his take on his old neighbor from Dorchester: “John Connolly is one of the calmest and most gentlemanly persons I have come to know over the years. While Maureen is always buzzing, filled with creative ideas and a Kerry accent that makes it almost impossible to understand every word, John is slow and the steady anchor of the business.”

In a 2023 story in the Hingham Anchor, daughter Siobhan noted that “the gallery itself was my dad’s dream. The word 'aisling' means dream or vision in Irish.” After her dad retired, she said “They went out on a limb and opened the art gallery.”

Maureen and Kimber Edwards say they want the gallery to remain open for years to come. But with herself in her 80s and John turning 90 next month, “The future is unknown,” Maureen said.

In the meantime, though, they plan to enjoy the “only thing we know” – good Irish art and each other’s company.