Last weekend in Dublin

Our last outing to Dublin was pretty great, art-wise. My absolute favorite was the Chester Beatty Library and their current exhibition of paintings. I was super excited about the entire collection and wish we had had more time to see everything they had on display.

My favorite items in the collection were definitely the paintings. The most well known of the paintings was Breton's The Gleaners. Painted in 1854, it depicts villagers from Courrières, where Breton was born, gathering the leftovers from the harvest in the fields under supervision. It's an oil painting and some of the figures are of people he knew, including his wife and some children from the village. Breton uses atmospheric perspective with the figures in the front being clear and crisp, paying particular attention to the highlighted neck of his wife, while the recognizable church in the background is soft and fuzzy.

 Fromentin's Falcon Hunt ('Algeria Remembered'), painted in 1874, is also in the Beatty collection. Compared to the Breton, the brush strokes are looser, not as crisp. A rework of an earlier painting, it clearly illustrates Fromentin's memories of traveling in northern Africa as a youth. The focus of the painting, despite the title, is the men on horseback, while the actual hunting and birds takes a back seat.

 

Jean-Léon Gérôme's Guards at the Door of a Tomb is probably the painting I spent the most time looking at. Considered one of the best of the Orientalist movement, most of his paintings are set in the near east, in Egypt. He used thin layers of paint to build up to highly realistic compositions. One of the most noticeable focal points is the four hand prints on the stark white wall, said to be the bloody hand prints of the faithful. I spent a good time examining the faces of the guards. They are so realistic they could have been a photograph.