National Gallery of Ireland presents an exhibition, Catching a Likeness, featuring over 50 portraits on paper from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. It will show how portraits have varied in accordance with prevailing artistic fashions, favoured styles, techniques and media.
Idealised heads feature alongside truthful self-portraits, literary likenesses and caricatures, while modern portraits display a more experimental approach.
The exhibition has drawn on portraits from the Gallery's prints & drawings collection, complemented by a selection of works on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts (University of Birmingham), The National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland (University of Limerick) and private collections. It includes works by Antonio Pollaiuolo (Portrait of a Young Man, 1470s), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (La belle Ferronnière, c.1802-6), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Jane Burden, 1858), and Paul Klee (Ghost of a Genius, no.10, 1922), as well as portraits Irish artists; Adam Buck, Muriel Brandt, Patrick Hennessy, Michael Kane, Sean Keating and Brian Bourke.
The spontaneity with which an artist manages to capture a likeness quickly is unique to portraits on paper, a quality not always found in a finished painting.
Catching a Likeness will be on display in the Print Gallery until 9 December. Admission is free. An accompanying illustrated brochure, edited by Niamh MacNally, is available from the Gallery Shop (€2). A series of talks will take place throughout September. -- www.nationalgallery.ie
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