An Irishman’s Diary on George Bernard Shaw and the National Gallery of Ireland

At the Clare Street entrance to the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin stands a life-size bronze statue of the playwright George Bernard Shaw. It was placed there in recognition of Shaw’s generous bequest to the gallery. In his will, he left a sizable donation to Ireland’s premier art gallery, which has become one of the largest financial donations in the gallery’s history.

In his last will, which he completed just before his 94th birthday, Shaw chose to bequeath the posthumous royalties from his estate to three cultural institutions which, he said, had helped him enormously in his formative years.

When he died in November 1950, he left a third of his royalties to the National Gallery of Ireland. He called it the “cherished asylum of my boyhood”, as he had spent many happy hours wandering through the gallery’s rooms as a young man, having left school at just 14 years of age.

He later said that he was leaving the funds to the gallery as it was the place “to which I owe much of the only real education I ever got as a boy in Eire”.

Another third share of his royalties was bequeathed to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, commonly known as Rada. This was on account of his long association with the dramatic arts and the theatre. The final share was to be awarded to the British Museum, where Shaw had spent countless afternoons in its reading room, gaining an informal education by reading voraciously.

These three institutions acted as a source of inspiration and learning for the young Shaw. He wanted to reward them, so that they could go on to provide future generations of young people with the same kind of education and insight into the human condition that he had received there.

Today, a wonderful collection of over 100 paintings and other works of art, purchased through the Shaw Fund, line the walls of the gallery.

Thanks to Shaw’s generous bequest, the gallery was able to purchase paintings by celebrated Irish artists such as Nathaniel Hone the Elder, Walter Osborne, Roderic O’Conor, Paul Henry and Jack B Yeats. The work of several respected international artists such as Giovanni di Paola, Francisco de Goya, Joshua Reynolds, Jacques-Louis David, Eva Gonzalès, Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro and Emil Nolde was also acquired thanks to Shaw’s substantial gift. Sculpture in wood, bronze and marble by some of Europe’s finest artists was also purchased.

As well as augmenting the gallery's existing art collections, royalties earned through Shaw's play Pygmalion and the film musical interpretation of the play, My Fair Lady, were put to good use over the years. They have been used to restore furniture in the Milltown collection in the 1960s and, in 1986, the fund was used to purchase and renovate number 90 Merrion Square.

The Shaw fund was also used as part of the initial investment for the Millennium Wing. The enormous sum of £2 million allowed the gallery purchase properties on Clare Street so that the gallery could expand and open a new wing, which opened to the public in January 2002.

Another important element of Shaw’s will was his plan to create a new alphabet. Known as the Shavian alphabet, or Shaw alphabet, Shaw envisaged that a new phonetic alphabet of the English language could be created “with one symbol for each sound” to make learning it easier. He stipulated that it should contain at least 40 letters and be as phonetic as possible. He said “let people spell as they speak without any nonsense about bad or good or right or wrong spelling and speech”. He also directed that it should not resemble the Latin alphabet, as this could lead to confusion. Language and its pronunciation was something of an obsession with Shaw. We only have to think of Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle to appreciate this.

Apart from his bequest to the gallery and the funding of a new alphabet, there are many other examples of Shaw’s generous nature. When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, he refused to take the money himself. Instead, he set up a trust to make Swedish literature more widely known through English language translations.

Shaw believed in the power of our cultural institutions to educate, entertain and inspire. On the wall beside his statue in the gallery is a quotation from the great man. It reads “you use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul”.

The gallery will continue to receive royalties from Shaw’s work until 2020, which will be 70 years after Shaw’s death.