This week Inside Culture looks at a major exhibition at The National Gallery of Ireland.
Creating History is a selection of 55 paintings, taken from their own collection and collections from around Ireland and the world. The paintings depict moments in our nation’s story from the days of St.Patrick to the early Twentieth Century and they were painted over the past four – often turbulent – centuries.
We see pictures of political gatherings, State funerals, evictions, emigrant families, a child’s funeral, the arrest of a political leader…..events which, combined, tell us the story or stories of who we are.
John Lavery (1856–1941)
High Treason, Court of Criminal Appeal: the Trial of Sir Roger Casement, 1916
Oil on canvas
194.5 x 302.5 cm
© UK Government Art Collection
Fionn Davenpot is joined in studio by Brendan Rooney who is the curator of Irish Art at the NGI and is the curator of this exhibition. He’s also joined by Dr. Roisín Kennedy from UCD School of Art and by Emiritius Professor of History at UCC, Tom Dunne. Both of them have contributed to a book to accompany the exhibition.
The panel discusses the range of pictures in the exhibition and how they can be interpreted today as well as how they were read in their own day. We hear how the themes of the show can guide us around our history and how we can choose to interpret images differently.
We visit the gallery several times over the course of this show to look at the themes or certain images in the collection.
THE EXHIBITION:
Creating History: Stories of Ireland in Art
Until 15 January 2017
National Gallery of Ireland.
Admission free.
www.nationalgallery.ie
THE BOOK
Creating History: Stories of Ireland in Art
Brendan Rooney (ed.) / National Gallery of Ireland
Published by Irish Academic Press
Broadcast on 31 October 2016
