The Friends lectures will take place in Cork Public Museum, Fitzgerald's Park, Mardyke Walk, Cork, T12VOAA. Street parking is available on Mardyke Walk. All welcome however places are limited so advance booking is essential on friends@crawfordartgallery.ie or on 021-4907864.
Tickets cost €10, students go free with a valid I.D.
Artemisia Gentileschi: Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) 1638.
(Royal Collection; photo public domain US; picture of the day, English Wikipedia March 8 2015).
The Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Lomi Gentileschi (1593 - c. 1653) is considered one of the most talented seventeenth-century artists. Her paintings are celebrated for her humanist naturalism, virtuoso handling of colour and texture, dramatic choreography of the characters with vibrant contrasts of chiaroscuro,often related to the drama of the subject-matter. Her success is the more outstanding for a period when access for women creatives to training, and professional independence was not easy, and she survived oppression in her life. Her portrayal of a range of powerful female subjects is especially remarkable: Cleopatra, Bathsheba, Judith, Jael, Susanna, Esther, Lucretia, Delilah, Mary Magdalene, a self-portrait as a lute-player, another as the Allegory of Painting, an extraordinary Annunciation. An exceptional recent exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris brought together many of her most famous works from international museums and private collections, adding to the reputation of this genius of the painting of intense human, especially female experience.
Image courtesy of Lost Studios
This talk will focus on the conservation of a true national treasure. The Goose Girl (1888) is a much loved oil painting by Edith Somerville in the collection of Crawford Art Gallery.
The Goose Girl is now the subject of conservation treatment while the doors of Crawford Art Gallery are closed for its major redevelopment. Supported by the Heritage Council through the Heritage Stewardship Fund 2025, this crucial work will ensure the historic painting’s future.
This public talk will shed new light on the painting, exploring its history and the steps being taken to care for it in Crawford Art Gallery’s new mobile conservation laboratory. This talk will feature three speakers: conservator Chiara Chillè, registrar Jean O’Donovan, and curator Michael Waldron.
This initiative underscores Crawford Art Gallery’s commitment to best-practice heritage care, adhering to a principle of minimal intervention—carrying out only those treatments necessary to stabilise and preserve the original condition of an artwork.
The Goose Girl is by far the largest and most accomplished of Somerville’s works held in a public collection in Ireland and attests to the artist’s desire to be remembered as a “great painter.” Somerville stands among a remarkable generation of Irishwomen—including her cousin Rose Barton and Mildred Anne Butler—who practised successfully as professional artists, particularly during the 1870s and 1880s.
Cork Opera House, courtesy of Dr Tom Spalding
2025 sees the 170th anniversary of the opening of the Cork Athenaeum on Emmet Place (then called Nelson Place). The present Cork Opera House traces its roots to this building which presented music, charity events and panoramas before being converted to a theatre, eventually being lost to fire in 1955. This talk will focus on the design and history of this building as well as its predecessor on the site (1840), and reveal the long story of its replacement by the current building which was opened exactly seventy years ago and designed by the well-known firm of Michael Scott and Associates- their only major Cork building.
Ruth Ripley with a bust by Séamus Murphy
In 1919, Joseph Stafford Gibson bequeathed a fund 'for the furthering of art in the city of his boyhood.’ In addition to supporting the acquisition of artworks for the collection of Crawford Art Gallery, the Gibson Bequest Fund allowed for travelling scholarships for promising artists of ‘unusual talent and good habits.’ These were awarded several times between 1923 and 1974, and facilitated artists the opportunity to expand their horizons in Madrid, Paris, and Rome. Join curator Dr Michael Waldron as he remembers the Gibson Travelling Scholars – including William Sheehan, Séamus Murphy, and Breda O’Donoghue-Lucci – and discusses the new Gibson Travelling Fellowship.
Image courtesy of Mera Qamar
Intertwined narratives of Irish and Palestinian histories reveal the shared struggle to preserve cultural identity in the absence and scarcity of official records. Through personal family stories, art, historical and archival fragments, Mera Qamar, Collections and Documentation Officer, reflects on the vital role of cultural memory and heritage research in resisting eradication and sustaining identity across generations.
Crawford Art Gallery exterior. Photo: Dr. Michael Waldron
Dagmar Ó Riain-Raedel is a historian with a special interest in medieval history and has written and lectured widely on the topic of Ireland’s connection with Europe and the revival of medievalism among Cork architects in the 18th and 19th century. Her book on the Hill architects in Cork, written with her co-author Richard Wood, will be published in November 2025.
The Friends lectures will take place in Cork Public Museum, Fitzgerald's Park, Mardyke Walk, Cork, T12VOAA. Street parking is available on Mardyke Walk. All welcome however places are limited so advance booking is essential on friends@crawfordartgallery.ie or on 021-4907864.
Tickets cost €10, students go free with a valid I.D.
© 2025 www.crawfordartgallery.ie
