Clear and stimulating vision from the National Gallery of Ireland

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This book is ‘a delightful concept, a gift if ever there were one’ and likely to be of wide interest well outside Ireland, says Julian Freeman

Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art edited by Janet McLean

150 not out: a century and a half after the foundation of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thames and Hudson have published this unusual anthology, a selection from works in the gallery’s collections, allocated to, or chosen by, 56 contemporary Irish writers, male and female. The men have the numerical edge, but it shouldn’t matter – the quality of Lines of Vision is scintillating, and the occasional double-takes (some of the writers have chosen the same paintings) makes the relative brevity of each one of this unusual series of journeys much more stimulating, more ‘edgy’ than one might expect. As a whole, the book is a delightful concept, a gift if ever there were one; one to dip into, or to read as a consecutive arrangement of written responses to art.

This collection is outstanding in its own way for its discontinuities; there are few natural pairings, or easy opposites, and for this reason amongst others the book will prove attractive to its ‘home’ crowd. Dare this outsider suggest that most of its content owns forms of quintessential Irish-ness? I do. Many of its contributors use their English, draw their ideas, develop their themes and accent their nuances in ways that can most readily be found in Ireland, but this should be as much of a recommendation to a non-partisan, curious, and open-minded audience as to Irish readers.

You need know little of the holdings of the National Gallery of Ireland to enjoy Lines of Vision and indeed there are parts of it that draw their strengths from a lack of familiarity with its holdings; to open it is to compare your response with that same openness to visual engagement that any unknowing visitor might experience on a first visit to any national collection. You want to hear the national, or the local ‘dialect’ if possible, and here you will, through chance encounters and planned returns to works that might as easily be recent revelations for their new-found interpreters, or, over the years, retain familiar, emotional baggage, for regular and deliberate re-examination. Lines of Vision presents such moments like artworks, to be faced as novelties, by those in the know and those unknowing. Though some may feel that it tends to reflect an older era of collecting, with stalwarts such as Paul Henry (1877–1958), Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957) (a lot, but why not?), John Lavery, Roderic O’Conor (1860–1940), Ernest Procter (1886-1935), Séan Keating (1889-1977), and Mary Swanzy (1882-1978), there are a scattering of interesting interlopers – Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) and German Expressionist Gabriele Munter (1877–1962) – and surprises also: Velasquez (1599–1660), Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1622) and the French classicist painter and sculptor J-L-E Meissonier, amongst others. The dialect is well to the fore, and this is an entertaining, often charming, and in every way compelling composite. Like the NG of I itself, it will not disappoint.

Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art edited by Janet McLean is published by Thames & Hudson, 2014.232pp., with over 50 colour illus, £19.95 (hbk). ISBN 978 0 500 517567