Ireland Guide
Cork
The Crawford Art Gallery
Address: Next to the Opera House in Emmet Place on the north side of Patrick Street
Telephone: 0121/490 7855,
Website: www.crawfordartgallery.ie
Opening time: Mon– Sat 10am–5pm
Opening time: Free; free guided tours of the current exhibitions Sat 2.30pm
The city's major set-piece sight is the Crawford Art Gallery. Its permanent collection of Irish and British art from the eighteenth century onwards, though far from compulsory viewing, is worth a couple of hours of your time, and the gallery hosts some interesting temporary exhibitions of Irish and international art in its striking modern extension and features an excellent café Crawford Art Gallery.
The lion's share of the collection is housed on the first floor, where, at the top of the stairs, Ulysses and a Companion Fleeing the Cave of Polyphemus (1776), a complex allegory by Cork's greatest and most troubled painter, James Barry, takes pride of place. On the landing hangs a fascinating View of Cork, painted in 1755 by John Butts. You can pick out the waterway that is now Patrick Street, the 1724 Custom House (with a Union Jack in the courtyard), which is now the gallery you're visiting, and the Dutch-style houses on the quays, evidence of Cork's role in expanding Anglo-Dutch trading influence in the North Atlantic.
Among some sentimentally cloying nineteenth- and twentieth-century works, the Gibson Galleries beyond shelter fine representative works by Jack B. Yeats and Limerick-born Seán Keating (1889–1977), many of whose academic realist paintings have achieved iconic status. Other highlights of the permanent collection include a piercing portrait of actor Fiona Shaw by Victoria Russell on the staircase to the first floor, and a ghostly rendition of the most famous portraits of literary icons Yeats, Beckett and Joyce by Louis le Brocquy on the ground floor.