To mark the National Gallery of Ireland’s 150th anniversary, over fifty Irish writers have contributed original stories, essays and poems to a collection of new writing inspired by the Gallery. Each writer has selected a picture from the permanent collection and used it as a point of departure for their text.

Edited by Janet McLean, NGI Curator, and published by Thames & Hudson with the National Gallery of Ireland, this book will be illustrated with images of the individual works selected by the writers.

This beautifully illustrated anthology, published to celebrate 150 years of the National Gallery of Ireland, features new work by more than 50 acclaimed Irish novelists, playwrights and poets. The contributors have selected pictures from the Gallery’s collection as setting-off points to explore ideas and tell stories about art, love, loss, family, dreams, memory, places and privacy. Both the artworks and the literary responses to them are wonderfully vibrant in their diversity.

Among the contributors to the publication are Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Frank McGuinness, Jennifer Johnston, Kevin Barry, Colm McGann, Paul Muldoon, Theo Dorgan, Gerald Dawe, Sebastian Barry, Michael Longley, Declan Huges, Thomas McCarthy, Donal Ryan, Peter Sirr and Enda Wyley.

Each of the writers in ‘Lines of Vision’ creates and connects vividly with other worlds – observed, remembered and imagined. Perceptive and, at times, deeply personal, their creative responses to pictures invite us to look at art in new lights and from different angles.

Janet McLean is Curator of Modern European Art 1850-1950 at the National Gallery of Ireland, in Dublin. She grew up in Co. Down and was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She has previously been a curator at the Watts Gallery, Compton, the Palace of Westminster and the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

To coincide with the launch of the publication, the Gallery will present an exhibition of the selected works, by artists such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Poussin, Velázquez, Walter Osborne, Jack B. Yeats, Paul Henry and Gerard Dillon.