Lines of Vision

Mounted in the Millennium Wing to mark the National Gallery of Ireland’s 150th anniversary, “Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art” invited 56 contemporary Irish writers to choose a work from the permanent collection and respond to it in whatever form they wished, whether poem, short story, or personal essay. The resulting texts were gathered in an anthology edited by curator Janet McLean and published by Thames and Hudson, with the exhibition displaying the chosen pictures alongside the new writing they had inspired.

Contributors included Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann, Paula Meehan, Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney, Sebastian Barry, Michael Longley, Kevin Barry, Jennifer Johnston, and Donal Ryan, among many others. Each writer was free to use the painting as a starting point for whatever the image brought to mind, whether art, love, loss, family, memory, or place, so the anthology ranges in mood and approach as widely as the collection itself, from old masters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Velázquez to Impressionist and Irish pictures by Monet, Jack B. Yeats, and Paul Henry.

Vermeer’s “Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid” (c. 1670–71), on permanent display at the gallery following its donation by Sir Alfred Beit in 1987, was among the works selected. The painting had already passed through one of the more dramatic chapters in the gallery’s history, having been stolen from Russborough House twice (1974 and 1986) before its recovery and eventual gift to the nation. In the context of a project asking writers to find personal meaning in art, the picture’s layered drama of silent communication between two women and its long Irish story made it a natural choice.