Paintings from Irish Collections

Held at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art on Parnell Square from 20 May to 25 August 1957, “Paintings from Irish Collections” brought together Old Master and modern works drawn from private hands across Ireland, giving Dublin audiences rare access to pictures that seldom left their owners’ country houses and townhouses. The exhibition was characteristic of the gallery’s mid-century programme of temporary loan shows, which supplemented its permanent holdings of nineteenth and early twentieth-century European art with material from the rich seam of private collecting then distributed across the island.

Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid was lent from the collection of Sir Alfred Beit, 2nd Baronet (1903–1994), who had purchased Russborough House in County Wicklow in 1952 and installed there one of the finest private accumulations of Dutch and Flemish painting in the British Isles. The collection had been formed in the late nineteenth century by Sir Alfred’s uncle, the financier Alfred Beit (1853–1906), with the close guidance of Wilhelm von Bode, director of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin. It included canvases by Rubens, Velázquez, Murillo, Gainsborough, and Reynolds alongside the Vermeer, which was regarded as the centrepiece of the group. Russborough itself would not open to the public until 1978, so loan exhibitions such as this offered the principal means by which Irish audiences could see the collection’s masterworks.

The 1957 exhibition reflected a broader moment of cultural activity in Dublin’s art world. Alfred Chester Beatty had moved his extraordinary library and collection of manuscripts and paintings to Dublin only a few years earlier, in 1950, and the city was becoming a more significant centre for serious collecting than its size might suggest. For the Municipal Gallery, drawing on the Beit holdings at Russborough alongside other private lenders was a practical way of extending the scope of what the permanent collection could show, and of reminding visitors that Ireland harboured works of international significance behind the gates of its great houses.