If you go Cheap trips to Ireland More on the British Isles Dublin for St. Patty's
An Irish gem rich in culture
Dublin shines with its bounty of museums and historic sights
By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 9/4/2002
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If you go Cheap trips to Ireland More on the British Isles Dublin for St. Patty's
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Lazing about isn't a real possibility, though. All of Dublin beckons. The now-prosperous city is showing itself off these days. Its center is compact, easily navigable for those who like to walk. English is spoken, although sometimes in accents hard for a North American to penetrate. The currency is the euro, a US dollar more or less. This is, in short, a place where you don't need a human guide - just a map.
Have fun customizing your own itinerary, first by logging on to www.visitdublin
.com while still in the States. Those with a morbid turn of mind, for instance, will want to visit Glasnevin Cemetery, the final resting place of such worthies as Eamon DeValera and Brendan Behan, and a treasure trove of High Victorian Gothic sculpture. Then there's the Bram Stoker house, where the author of "Dracula" lived.
After checking into the Merrion, check out its art. Owners Lochlan and Brenda Quinn avoided period paintings, even though the hotel was created by transforming four 18th-century terrace houses. More than 90 percent of the Merrion's holdings are by Irish artists, and the emphasis is on modern and contemporary. So extensive is the collection that it has its own fat catalog you can wander around with.
The Quinns have such good taste that Raymond Keaveney, the director of the National Gallery, says he'd like to have some of the works in the hotel travel across the street to his museum, to which the Quinns have already been generous donors. The once-sleepy gallery is now alive. Earlier this year, it opened its Millennium Wing, which makes it a contender for major touring shows. The older galleries have been spiffed up too, creating newly elegant settings for masterworks by Vermeer, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and others.
The paintings come with stories, which you might expect in this storytelling country. The Vermeer was stolen twice from the home of an Irish peer who finally gave up and donated it to the gallery. The great Caravaggio went unrecognized for decades, hanging in the dining room of the Jesuit Community of Leeson Street in Dublin. When the priests sent it out for cleaning, its true identity was discovered and the Jesuits have now put it on indefinite loan at the gallery. The National Gallery has also been able to buy art, thanks in part to George Bernard Shaw, who so loved the place that he left it a share of the royalties from his works. After "Pygmalion" became "My Fair Lady," the gallery went on a shopping spree.
A morning walk around the central city might include a peek at the Oscar Wilde statue on Merrion Square and a visit to the National Museum of Ireland, an 1890 building that tells the country's story from prehistory through the era of Celtic gold to the struggle for Irish independence - and winds up, oddly, with a fine if small display of Egyptian antiquities. Nearby is the National Library of Ireland, home to millions of books from the 13th century onward, and home also to the Genealogical Office, where those of Irish ancestry can trace their roots and apply to the Office of the Chief Herald of Ireland for a Grant of Arms. This involves a herald painter creating a unique design that, in the past, you'd display on your shield or banner so the enemy would know at whom he was charging. Nowadays, it would make an impressive logo on stationery.
Another historic "must" is the General Post Office, dating from 1818 and built in the Greek Revival style. More important than its severe, symmetrical architecture, though, is its role as headquarters for the Easter Rising of 1916, when the Irish Republic was proclaimed. The insurgents held out here for a week, before being beaten by British forces. The GPO was gutted by fire, rebuilt only in the 1920s under an independent Irish government. Also on the architectural front, see the Irish Museum of Modern Art, housed in the finest Georgian building in Dublin, once the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.
Trinity College Library is yet another "must." Its star attraction is, of course, the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript more than 1,000 years old. A lavishly decorated copy of the four gospels, it was probably produced by monks on the island of Iona. The library's presentation of the priceless book is state-of-the-art, including videos explaining techniques and materials: It took the skins from about 185 calves to produce the vellum for the book. On the day of my visit, the book was open to the page with the portrait of St. John and the proclamation "In the beginning was the Word," an apt line in this most literary of countries.
You can explore Irish literature through the the Dublin Writers Museum and the James Joyce Centre, as well as through the drama scene, starting with the legendary Abbey Theatre. The Abbey Players premiered landmark works including John Millington Synge's "Playboy of the Western World," Sean O'Casey's "The Plough and the Stars," and, more recently, Brian Friel's "Dancing at Lughnasa." At the Gate Theatre, which is tucked into an 18th-century building, I was lucky to catch the world premiere of Friel's "Two Plays After."
In addition to the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery, Dublin has a third major art museum, the Hugh Lane Gallery, which boasts a recent acquisition that might be considered unsuitable for those under 21. Not because of anything to do with pornography or foul language, mind you. The exhibit is the re-creation of the London studio of the Irish-born painter Francis Bacon. Bacon, who died in 1992, was also celebrated as a slob. "I just love living in chaos," he once explained. In preparation for moving the contents of his studio from London to Dublin, archeologists and conservators painstakingly cataloged more than 7,000 things, from old newspapers to paint cans and brushes, a battered wicker chair, and 100 canvases the tempestuous painter actually slashed. The walls are a mess because Bacon used them as a palette. The floor of the room is completely hidden by the clutter.
The museum notes that with the Bacon project, it has produced "the first computerized archive of the entire contents of an artist's studio." Art history aside, parents will see this as a nightmare version of a teenager's bedroom.