Information
The National Gallery of Ireland holds the most comprehensive and eminent collection of Dutch and Flemish art in Ireland. Since its founding in 1854, the Gallery has amassed more than 650 Dutch and Flemish works. A highlight is Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid, which belongs to an exceptional collection of genre paintings, including works by Gabriel Metsu and Jan Steen. The Gallery holds the only nocturnal landscape painting by Rembrandt, Landscape with Rest on the Flight into Egypt, and Jacob van Ruisdael’s grandest view of Bentheim Castle. Other artists represented in the collection include Pieter Lastman, Jan Lievens, Govaert Flinck, Ferdinand Bol, and Willem Drost. The Gallery has a smaller but spectacular collection of Flemish paintings by artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, and Anthony van Dyck; and early Netherlandish artists, such as Gerard David, Frans Pourbus the Younger, and Willem Key. The most recent acquisitions are Head of a Bearded Man by Rubens, and a still life painting by Rachel Ruysch, the first work by a woman artist to join the Gallery’s Dutch collection.
Dr. Lizzie Marx, Curator of Dutch and Flemish Art (March 2024)
Collection catalogues
Later Flemish paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland: the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries
Oldfield, David, Elizabeth Mayes, Helen Litton
Dublin 1992
Netherlandish fifteenth and sixteenth century paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland: a complete catalogue
Vogelaar, Christiaan, Elizabeth Mayes
Dublin 1987
Dutch seventeenth and eighteenth century paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland : a complete catalogue
Potterton, Homan, Elizabeth Mayes
Dublin 1986