Free, with a Caravaggio that spent decades hanging unrecognised in a Jesuit dining room a mile away, and the best Jack B. Yeats collection anywhere.
The Caravaggio
The Taking of Christ, 1602. It was lost for two centuries, misattributed to a Dutch follower, and hung in the dining room of the Jesuit residence on Leeson Street where the fathers ate under it without knowing.
A conservator from the gallery, called in to look at some paintings in 1990, recognised it. It was cleaned, confirmed, and is now on indefinite loan from the Jesuits.
It is a night scene lit by a lantern, Judas’s kiss caught at the instant of contact, and the man holding the lantern at the right edge is Caravaggio himself. It hangs in a normal gallery with normal lighting and you can stand a metre from it for as long as you like.
Jack B. Yeats
The gallery holds the largest collection of his work anywhere, in a dedicated room. He was the poet’s brother, he painted Ireland through the revolutionary period and after, and his late work goes so thickly impasto that it stops being illustrative altogether.
If you know nothing about Irish art, this room is the one that will change that.
What else
The Shaw Room, a long portrait gallery — George Bernard Shaw left the gallery a third of his royalties in gratitude for an education he said he got here rather than at school, and My Fair Lady has paid for a great deal of it.
Irish painting more broadly: Roderic O’Conor, William Orpen, Paul Henry, Walter Osborne, Nathaniel Hone.
European collection with Vermeer, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Goya, Titian, Fra Angelico and Monet — modest in size and high in quality.
The Millennium Wing on Clare Street is where the temporary exhibitions go, and those are usually ticketed.
Practical
Free for the permanent collection. Closed Monday mornings; open late on Thursdays.
The building is a merge of four wings across a century and a half and the circulation is not intuitive — take the map.
Merrion Square outside is the best Georgian square in the city, with the Oscar Wilde statue lounging on a rock at the corner and doors in every colour, which is the photograph everyone takes.
More Museums
National Museum of Ireland — Archaeology
Free, and it holds the best prehistoric gold collection in western Europe plus four Iron Age bog bodies. The single most underrated building in Dublin.
EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum
Ten million people left this island. This is the museum about where they went and what they did, in the vaults of a nineteenth-century dock warehouse.