Thursday 8 August 2013

Dublin Visit

Yesterday I went to Dublin with my daughter, on both a cultural and fun visit! After a coffee shop stop once we got to the city, we started the day with a visit to the National Gallery. "Masterpieces of the Collection" was the main exhibition on and I wanted to revisit one of my favourite paintings in the collection - Frederick William Burton's "Hillela and Hildebrand - the Meeting on the Turret Stairs". Unfortunately, due to the sensitivity of the painting, it can only be viewed on certain days and Wednesday wasn't one of them! But here is an image anyway. 

My daughter is familiar with American art history and loves the likes of Jackson Pollock for his action style and painterliness. She had, however, never heard of Jack B Yeats, and I wanted to rectify this! There were  a number of Yeats paintings in the Masterpiece exhibition, and she did like them for the same reasons she likes Pollock. She also enjoyed some 18th century Constable-like landscapes in the collection.


We also popped over to the nearby National Museum of Ireland, which is almost like a home away from home to us. On this visit we focused on the compact but superb Egyptian room. After lunch we went for a glorious stroll (blue sky and heat!) around St. Stephen's Green, before joining the Viking Splash tour of Dublin. The tour takes place in a DUKW vehicle, created for WW2 and we were told that our particular vehicle had been on the beaches of Normandy. Part of the tour takes place in the water of the Grand Canal Basin which makes this a very unique tour of Dublin. The tour includes the wearing of faux Viking hats and shouting at pedestrian "Celts" so it was lots of fun! (The DUKW we were in was the Thor, but they all look the same -- like a boat in the water, and like a truck on land.)



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