Parnell Square and around

The elegant, Georgian, stone-clad Charlemont House, with its curved outer and inner walls and Neoclassical interior, has provided a permanent home for the Hugh Lane gallery since 1933. Sir Hugh, a nephew of Lady Gregory, wanted Dublin to house a major gallery of Irish and international art. He amassed a considerable collection by persuading native artists to contribute their work and purchasing many other paintings himself, particularly from the French Impressionist school and Italy.

The gallery holds around half of the Lane collection (the rest is in London’s National Gallery) and only a fraction is on display here at any one time, though you’re likely to see works by Renoir, Monet and Degas, as well as Pissarro and the Irish painters Jack B. Yeats, Roderic O’Connor and Louis le Brocquy, as well as stained-glass pieces by Evie Hone and Harry Clarke. Simultaneously, there are usually other temporary exhibitions of more modern artworks.

Part of the gallery is devoted to a recreation of Dublin-born painter Francis Bacon’s studio, transported from its original location at Reece Mews in South Kensington, London, where the artist lived and worked for the last thirty years of his life. After his death in 1992, his studio was donated to the gallery by his heir, John Edwards, and reconstructed here with astonishing precision – more than seven thousand individual items were catalogued and placed here with verisimilitude in the reconstruction. The studio can only be viewed through the window glass but amongst the apparent debris are an old Bush record-player, empty champagne boxes and huge tins of the type of matt vinyl favoured by Bacon, the fumes of which exacerbated his asthma. The surrounding rooms hold displays of memorabilia, such as photographs and correspondence, as well as a detailed database of every item found in the studio (accessible via touchscreen consoles) and large canvases from the painter’s last years.

The Dublin Writers Museum aims to illuminate Ireland’s literary history, featuring not just giants such as Wilde, Shaw, Joyce and Beckett, but also lesser-known figures like Sheridan Le Fanu and Oliver St John Gogarty. The ground floor contains a plethora of displays on particular writers or literary schools, and it is well worth picking up the free and entertaining guide-tape to receive background information on the authors.

The hall downstairs, hung with modern paintings of writers, leads to an outdoor Zen garden where you can contemplate works you’ve purchased in the museum’s bookshop or, alternatively, head for the café at the rear. On the first floor is the Gallery of Writers, an elegant salon with plasterwork by Michael Stapleton, which features James Joyce’s piano and more paintings, of which the most impressive is John B. Yeats’s portrait of George Moore. Beside this is the Gorham Library, which features numerous rare editions. The museum’s basement houses one of the Northside’s best restaurants, Chapter One.

The James Joyce Centre occupies a grand eighteenth-century townhouse, restored in the 1980s. The centre aims to illuminate the work of perhaps Ireland’s most imaginative yet most complex writer, who spent part of his life living in the inner Northside, and drew upon his experiences in the creation of his characters and the settings for his works. The building features decorative stucco mouldings by Michael Stapleton. The ground floor houses a small shop full of Joyceiana, such as books and prints, and an airy courtyard which includes the actual period door of 7 Eccles Street, the fictional home of Leopold and Molly Bloom, two of the main protagonists in Ulysses, as well as a somewhat enigmatic, modernist Joyce-inspired sculpture of a cow.

The building’s upper floors house a recreation of the tiny room occupied by Joyce in Trieste, featuring various books, pianola music-rolls and a splendid collection of hats, as well as photographs of people and places associated with Ulysses, and touchscreen consoles tracing the development of the novel’s plot and its variety of characters. Three short documentary films on the writer’s life can also be viewed.