SOPHIE WYNNE EVANS,
Sir, - When I was nine years old a beloved aunt told my brother and I that she was taking us to the pictures. Delighted to be going to the cinema, a rare and previous treat, we were dismayed to find that she meant a trip to the National Gallery in Merrion Square. We tramped about truculently filled with the peculiar inertia that only museums can evoke.
Climbing up one of the staircases, I jumped suddenly - it seemed to me that a figure in one of the paintings was alive and moving. I turned and looked at it. It was a painting of Christ - hands bound, head bowed and crowned with thorns. A faded red cloak was thrown around his shoulders and in his hand he held a reed.
He appeared to be shaking with exhaustion but my young eyes didn't know how that could be. All I knew was that the quiet patience of the figure, lost among so many other paintings, touched me, and I cried.
Years passed and whenever I returned to the Gallery I looked for my painting but never saw it. I decided I must have dreamt it.
A few years ago, after meeting a friend in the old restaurant of the Gallery for coffee and a natter, we wandered vaguely about until we arrived in the Italian rooms. There in front of me was my painting, plucked from dream into reality. It displayed the same paradoxical strength and vulnerability that I remembered, the same waxen tones in the skin of the dying Christ.
The painting's title is "Ecce Homo", echoing Pilate's words "Behold the man", and it was painted by Titian in the mid-1500s. I was told it had been in storage for years and was now on display again. Titian had repositioned the reed in Christ's hand and also the set of the shoulder and this echo image is what gives the impression of movement.
I sing the painting's praises now because, for a time, it has a room all to itself; Room 6 on the ground floor of the main building. It will be on display only until October 13th when it will be loaned out. It is one of the gallery's most requested paintings; already this year it has been to America and last year it travelled to Venice. So now is the time to go.
Two other paintings by Van Dyck inspired by Titian's "Ecce Homo" hang on an adjacent wall. Impressive though they are, they serve only to highlight the quiet beauty of Titian's work. The facial expressions on Van Dyck's figures suffer the same fate as so many others on a similar theme - more reminiscent of martyred mother-in-law than dying Christ.
I invite anyone who has a spare moment to go and see this painting. It is one of our country's treasures and we are very fortunate to own it. Maybe, as happened to me today, a friendly caretaker will position a chair perfectly for you so that you can sit and drink it its beauty in comfort. - Yours, etc.,
SOPHIE WYNNE EVANS,
Beech Road,
Shankill,
Co Dublin.