National Gallery of Ireland

The National Gallery of Ireland is where Cushla Lavery and Michael Agnew pause during their Dublin visit to look at a painting by Sir John Lavery. In a city marked by recent bombings, the gallery’s quiet rooms become the setting for a conversation in which a family portrait opens onto questions of belonging, history, and political allegiance.

Setting and Visit

Michael leads Cushla through the National Gallery of Ireland, with its high rooms and echoing corridors, and stops before a large painting. The visit takes place against the violence of the surrounding city: Michael has told her that bombs went off at three locations and that eleven people were killed near their hotel. The contrast places the gallery’s stillness within, rather than outside, the historical pressures shaping their time in Dublin.

The Painting and Its Family

The painting shows Hazel, whose face appeared on the Irish pound note, seated in rich blue, burgundy, and purple clothes with a little girl beside her. An older girl stands apart, while another woman carries a platter of fruit; a mirror at the back reflects the artist at work. Cushla reads the older girl’s position as loneliness, rather than as a detail of a harmonious family group. Michael explains that she is the painter’s daughter from an earlier marriage, and that Hazel was his second wife, an American he married in his fifties. Hazel appeared in more than four hundred of his paintings; when Lavery was asked to create an image for Irish banknotes, he used her face as a symbol of Ireland.

Political Resonance

Michael identifies the painter as Sir John Lavery, a Belfast Catholic who became a portraitist to royalty, Winston Churchill, and other prominent figures. He describes Lavery as having to navigate the narrow space between his place in British high society and his support for Irish nationalism. The gallery scene thus connects the intimate arrangement of a family portrait to the public making of national symbols, while Cushla’s attention to the solitary daughter resists the image’s polished surface.

As they leave, the conversation continues on the walk back to the hotel. Michael tells Cushla about another Lavery painting, depicting the trial of Sir Roger Casement, and describes its quiet subversion: amid the ceremony of a British court, attention is drawn to the condemned figure in the dock. The gallery’s significance in the episode lies not only in the painting they view, but in how looking at art gives Michael and Cushla a way to discuss the entanglement of private lives and contested political histories.