The year in musuems

My idea of a perfect day out involves a visit to a museum. With ten museums in four countries visited in 2023, it’s been a pretty good year. When I remember a visit to a museum, I remember the person or people I spent that precious time with. I can recapture the mood of the day and the inspirational effect of the art or history.

Let’s start with tables. On a visit to Ireland in October, I visited three museums. One was Derrynane House on the beautiful Iveragh Peninsula in Co. Kerry. This is the house Daniel O’Connell inherited from his uncle, the place where he felt most at home throughout his life.

In this dining room, the Liberator would have spent many entertaining evenings with friends and family. Also in the house is O’Connell’s death bed, which was transported back from Genoa. By the way, there is a brilliant novel by Seamus Martin about O’Connell’s ill-fated final pilgrimage called Duggan’s Destiny.

The next table is from 14 Henrietta Street house, the once grand eighteenth century residence that ended up housing more than 100 people living in tenements. This table is from the flat of the last resident of the house who left in the 1970s.  

Another table that caught my eye was in the Kunstmuseum Basel. This 1916 painting by Marc Chagall is called Strawberries or Bella and Ida at the Table. I like Chagall but I didn’t know he painted peaceful family scenes.

Two cats

Also in Basel, I saw some of Giacometti’s works, including one of his rare animal sculptures, The Cat (1951). I once worked in a building on Giacomettistrasse in Bern, which is where I first heard the name, to be honest.

The other cat is the lynx which was successfully reintroduced into the wild in Switzerland about 50 years ago. This lynx is in Lugano Museo cantonale di storia naturale. We spent a couple of happy hours in there as a large family group on a rainy afternoon in July. Serious paws!

More paintings

I’m one of those annoying people who takes photos in museums but I really do like to look back on them and remember the artists and paintings. The photo at the top of the page was taken in the Rjiksmusuem in September. It was my first visit to Amsterdam and I fell in love with the city. The famous painting everyone wants to see in the photo is The Milkmaid by Vermeer. You could get an excellent view of most other paintings.

I can’t resist including another Basel painting here. Portrait of Bonifacius Amerbach by Hans Holbein was painted in 1519. More than 500 years old and the face looks like it could be someone you might know. Incredible.

And here is another lovely face from the Strasbourg Museum of Fine Arts, Virgin in Prayer (ca. 1640) by Gian Battista Sassoferrato. I travelled to Strasbourg in France by train in February to meet two old friends, who came from Germany and Belgium. Such a treat.

Sassoferatto was a new name to me and I was interested to learn that he specialised in depictions of the Virgin in Prayer, which were apparently all the rage in the 1600s.

Handwritten

The last two items are the least picturesque but they are fascinating. Only yesterday, I visited the historic Abbey Library in St. Gallen, which has a very important collection of Irish manuscripts dating from the seventh to ninth centuries.

In my book The Naked Irish, I quote some verse inscribed in the margins of the Priscian Manuscript (ca. 850) – to show the ancient roots of Irish writing. But this was actually my first time seeing the manuscript. This version of Priscian’s Latin Grammar was transcribed possibly in Co. Down, with lots of glosses (explanations), a third of which were in Old Irish. That makes it one of the key sources for the study of the language.

And the last exhibit is from Listen Now Again, a lovely little exhibition of Seamus Heaney’s life and work, running in the Bank of Ireland Culture and Heritage Centre on Westmoreland Street until the end of 2025. I opened my first bank account in this building as a student. It was originally home to the Parliament of Ireland before the Act of Union, the world’s first purpose-built bicameral parliament house. The building has been in the hands of the bank since 1803. But to get back to Seamus Heaney, this sample of the poet’s creative process is pretty amazing, don’t you think? Even Nobel Prize winners have to edit.

Observant readers will note that I’ve only mentioned eight museums so far. I also visited the Museum of Amsterdam, which covers the social and commercial history of the city. But my pics are hopeless. The same goes for Kilmainham Goal in Dublin, quite the gloomy tour, especially in the lashing rain, but very interesting.

What museums did you visit this year? Any recommendations for me? On my list for next year is the house on Lake Geneva designed by Le Corbusier, Villa “Le Lac”. It opens again in March and I’d love to go there on a warm day. We are knee deep in snow at the moment in Fribourg. So first, let’s enjoy the winter!

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