NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND
A stunning collection
If you are interested in art you are in the right place!
The collection has about 14,000 artworks, including about 2,500 oil paintings, 5,000 drawings, 5,000 prints, and some sculpture, furniture and other works of art.
Walking through all the rooms in this beautiful scenario is something unbelievable.
It seems that some of the characters can turn alive and enjoy with you the visit.
Don`t forget the visit is free and the members of the museum have done an app in 2013 useful to join the visit and get it really interactive.
In Dublin especially in autumn the weather is not very warm and you can get your self-warmer visiting museums and galleries. Walking through the city is plenty of art, you can easily get fascinated by this modern city different than other city all around. Remind “The city is the capital of the contemporary art”.
As an Italians lover of art we decided to have a look in the national gallery of Ireland, this building is located in the Georgian part of Dublin, all this area is like the past and the characteristics is the similarity of the houses. The museum has two entrances one, the biggest, in Merrion Square. Going through this gate it seems too enter in a Greek temple, it has four columns, amazing! The other entrance is in Clare Street, this is smaller but the view of the drown stair get you really ecstatically.
At the entrance you can find a map of the floors, it is not common find in a Irish museum a guide in different languages. This is meant how important a good impression on tourist is!
The exhibition is divided in four floors adapted for the display and one for the library and a theatre. The visit is completely free and you can create your own way through the paintings because it is not placed in a chronological order. My suggestion is going directly to the third floor and gets fascinated by the European art aged between
1300 and 1700 and following the colors of the rooms until the ground floor. The collection satisfies all kind of people, especially students, it is like your brain is having a big jump in the past.
Being for the first time in Dublin and also in Ireland make us curios about the story of this place and why was decided to open such a great gallery. In all the museums fortunately we found always kind people prepared to give a lot of information about it. They said that in 1852 William Dargan, the father of the Irish rail network, approached the Royal Dublin Society with an offer to underwrite a spectacular exhibition on Leinster Lawn in Dublin. The aim was imitate the great exhibition that was placed at Crystal Palace in London the previous year. Just eleven months later, the exhibition was opened in an astonishing series of pavilions. As we just know English and Irish didn’t have a great relationship and this way of imitation makes us smiling. They also told us that the city is really younger than the other European capital and in that period having a huge gallery took an active interest and the member of the council started thinking to give a permanent establishment of a National Gallery in Dublin.
We made some calculations and we ended that the gallery was opened 154 years ago to the public and the collection comprised just 112 pictures. Comparted today it was less than one floors.
Going on with the visit and took the lift to the third floor, we landed in a different planet! The first room, appears to the lifts door, is the 25. The magnificent of this huge room is the color of the wall, totally red but also the sizes of the tales, the painters were Italians and it seems clearly the cleverness of them. From room 25 to 33 we were walking in the Beit Wing built in 1968 as an extention again with designs by Frank DuBerry, senior architect with the Office of Public Works. This is dedicated at the European art. You can find here not also Italians but French, Spanish, Dutch painter. In the middle of room 32 there are some stairs for the Miltown Wing, following the color here the rooms are light blue. You need to have a great sight if you don’t want to be tired in the next rooms! In the exhibition they have some of the most important tales of famous artist as Rembrandt, Vermeer and unfortunately they weren’t there when we go because they were borrowed for another exposition somewhere around the world.
Walking and walking we finally arrive in room 41, which is the meaning of this room you can easily ask. For example for Italians is an emotion, I think for Americans too, not every day you can see a masterpiece of Caravaggio. Throughout history, very few artists have caused as radical a change in pictorial perceptions as Caravaggio. He painted this extraordinary work for the Roman Marquis Ciriaco Mattei in 1602. Offering a new visual approach to the biblical story, Caravaggio placed the figures close to the picture plane and used a strong light-and-dark contrast, giving the scene an extraordinary sense of drama. Judas has identified Christ with a kiss, as the temple guards move in to seize Him. The light, the wrinkles on the head and all the imperceptible details, take you in the scene and in not easy divert your attention. Thanks to this masterpiece the Gallery became the center of international attention. This tale was long believed to be lost or destroyed, was discovered in a Jesuit house of studies in Dublin. The picture remains in the Gallery on indefinite loan from the Jesuit fathers.
At the end of the third floor the walls appear again totally red, perception is needed! Another master piece is showed in room 47. Guess which now is the turn of Francisco de Goya, considered the most important Spanish artist of late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the gallery they have a tale of Antonia, a famous Spanish actress, is shown wearing a black dress and an intricately painted black lace mantilla. Her dark figure stands out in stark contrast to the shimmering gold sofa that she sits on, a prop from Goya’s studio. Her arms are covered with pale silk mitts and she holds a fan in her hands. Her face is slightly melancholic, while irony appears in her smile. But watching all we see is sadness maybe for her flat way of living.
Continuing in the Dargan Wing you get lost in the Grand Gallery, it is like the huge salon reserved for dancing in the old castles.
In this floors there is also a room dedicated to temporary expositions, it depends on the period you can find the unthinkable, trust me! We found tales about a circus in the late 90s
The second floor is not completely reserved for expositions, in the right side they have a research area. Last summer they have hosted an American restorer who takes care of one tale of Perugino, this painting was restores between Los Angeles and Dublin, believe or not the painter is Italian.
We just had a quick view at the portrait collection and a the print gallery.
We had almost finished the but the first floor is bigger than the third and get more attention! It is divided in 4 parts. If you get in from Merrion Square Entrance you are directly in the Miltowm Wing, from room 14 to 20, it all about irish art between 1835 and 1965, therefore modern art.
One tale that kept us attentions is A Convent Garden, Brittany by William John Leech.
Leech’s first wife Elizabeth, posing as a novice of the Soeurs du Saint-Esprit, looks up from her prayer book as nuns from the same order process in the background. She wears the Breton bridal costume traditionally worn by novices on the day they took their final vows. The setting is the walled garden of the nuns’ hospital and convent in Concarneau, in which Leech had convalesced in 1904. The painting reflects an interest in the religious devotion of the Breton community that Leech shared with many visiting artists, but also the artist’s love of sunlight and pattern. All in is harmonious and the different shades of green give hope.
Finding Power, by Joe Caslin
This is a new installation in the middle of the first floor, you can see it thought the doors of the others rooms and walking in taking stairs from room 18. It is enormous and at the first sight it seems not be fitted in the right place. But Finding Power is the result of a project, and the culmination of Caslin’s in-depth investigation of Burton’s work and the role of the artist or public persona. During the project, Caslin looked closely at the power that comes with public platform, and the significance of having (or indeed losing) agency and control. In order to inform his practice fully and consider the topic in contemporary society, Caslin connected with both the Gallery team, and a panel of both public and private figures.
The first floor is mostly dedicated to the Irish art and the names sound strange but it’s worth it have a look. We have just the last part to see but maybe the first if you enter from Clare Street. The walls here are with, in this way the tales seem really part of the walls. Where we are is the first addition to the Gallery complex in the twenty- first century the Millennium Wing which opened in January 2002. Designed by London-based architects Benson & Forsyth, and located on sites purchased by the Gallery in 1990 and 1996.
In Room 1 to 11 is shown the art of the major European painters in the modern age. They have Picasso, Monet and many others name. in room 3 you could admire Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat by Monet. He lived in Argenteuil on the outskirts of Paris. During this period, he fitted out a boat as a floating studio and painted many views of the River Seine and its banks. He made this picture in 1874, the year that the first Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris. Monet has used distinct broken brushstrokes and complementary colors, to suggest light and movement. The shifting clouds, rippled water, autumn leaves, and gliding yacht further evoke a sense of transience. Most of the scene is composed of sky and reflections.
DO YOU FEEL BORING OF THE MUSEUM AND WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT?
In the info point they say that they offers some project for teen and students, the programme seeks to provide opportunities for 16-25 year olds to independently connect with and respond to the Gallery and its collection. This programme considers what is of interest to young people and offers activities which the audience have identified as being of real importance to them and their peers. The aim is to make real connections between historical artworks and traditional methods of making art with new media and contemporary issues through a range of activities and events.
The visit may takes about 2 hours or much more, there is a huge space where you can have a break in the first floor.
We were amused by different art and the way they manage to put all together in an elegant gallery. Have a look it is worth it. You will never get an experience like that in Dublin.