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At the northwest side of Merrion Square, alongside the back of Leinster House - its country-house facade - is Ireland's National Gallery (Mon-Wed, Fri & Sat 9.30am-5.30pm, Thurs 9.30am-8.30pm, Sun 12-5.30pm; www.nationalgallery.ie ). The gallery is a place that has a real energy about it, not only because of the number of enthusiastic visitors, but also thanks to the many Dubliners who lunch at the excellent restaurant housed in the atrium on the ground floor. The museum is divided into three main sections exhibiting more than two thousand paintings of Irish, European and British art: the Milltown, the Dargan and the North Wing, with the new Millennium Wing, on Clare Street. The best place to start a tour is in the Milltown Wing , where rooms one to six house Irish art, a great deal of which is by artists working in England; the most significant of the artists of this section being Nathaniel Hone the Elder, whose caustic painting The Conjurer , in room one, satirizes the former president of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds. Many of the works in rooms two and three illustrate a tendency towards the romanticization of the lives of the rural poor: Joseph Haverty's Blind Piper and Augustus Burke's Connemara Girl are classic examples. Also in room three is Edwin Hayes' sentimental depiction of an emigrant ship, bathed in a warm twilight glow, leaving Dublin harbour. In contrast to these are the more politicized representations of Irish peasant life: the emotive sculpture of a lost, bare-footed child, The Homeless Wanderer , by John Henry Foley, and the most obvious indictment, Ejected Family , by the Scottish painter, Erskine Nicol, who skilfully depicts the horrors of a peasant eviction. Rooms five and six feature Irish works from the early twentieth century; of special note are Paul Henry's beautifully executed representations of the west of Ireland. Room six culminates in a portrait of Lady Lavery , by her husband Belfast-born painter John Lavery. An American heiress and leading socialite of her time, her face appeared on banknotes following Independence in 1921 as the female personification of Ireland. Turning to the left brings you to room seven, where the historical or thematic context on any painting can be gleaned from one of the excellent multimedia consoles; though entries have not been updated since the gallery's extension, and many of the maps are now out-of-date. Room seven leads you into the ground floor of the Dargan Wing , and the new Yeats Room , dedicated to the famous artistic family as a whole, but most especially to Jack B. Yeats (brother of poet W.B. Yeats), whose exuberant canvasses line the room. As well as the vibrant colours of Jack's work, the room also features the more sober portraits executed by his father, John B. Yeats, two of which are of his sons, Jack and W.B.. The Yeats Room gives way to the grandiose Shaw Room , with its splendid Waterford Crystal chandeliers, dominated by the magnificent 1854 Marriage of Princess Aoife of Leinster and Richard de Clare , by Daniel Maclise. The painting was commissioned to satisfy the nineteenth-century fascination with the Celts and, consequently, Maclise chose the symbolic event of the marriage of the daughter of a Celtic chief and the first Anglo-Norman invader in 1170 as his subject; the depiction of the defeated Celts has erroneously been interpreted by nationalists as a subtle critique of English involvement in Irish affairs. At the opposite end of the foyer to the Shaw Room is Room 32, the most interesting of the ground floor section of the North Wing , where the famous portraits of James Joyce, by Jacques Blanche, and Sean O'Casey, by Augustus John, are displayed. The rest of this section, rooms 33 to 36, is dedicated to the works of British artists, most notably Reynolds and Gainsborough. Rooms 23 and 24 on the second floor of the North Wing display a fine selection of altarpieces and early Renaissance paintings, including an exquisite panel by Fra Angelico, while rooms 26 to 30 contain Flemish, German and Dutch art. Room 31 houses the gallery's impressive collection of Spanish art including works by Goya, Murillo and Velasquez. Room 24 leads to the central Milltown Wing where the focus is on Italian painting featuring masters such as Titian and Tintoretto; however, pride of place must go to the stunning The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio, which hung on the living room wall of a Jesuit house in Leeson Street before being discovered and moved to the Gallery in the late 1980s. If, at this stage, your cultural - but not your physical - appetite has been satisfied, you should retrace your steps to the atrium on the ground floor to enjoy the superlative Fitzer's restaurant .
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