Rant in D Minor: We need to talk about Harry

Consider, if you will, the not-so-little miracle that is the National Gallery. Here the footsore, the bewildered, the stray, the discombobulated and the plain strapped for the price of a pint can wander in off the street unchallenged and for nothing – that is free gratis – perambulate at leisure through tall and hallowed halls and gaze upon images that’ll put iron back in the blood until the next bus home. Alan Moore was right. Put a man in a shithole and he behaves like a rat. Put him in a palace and he feels like a king.

Over the past month your correspondent has been drawn back to the National Gallery again and again to witness the masterpieces arrayed there. The wild, almost hallucinogenic watercolours on show in the Jack B Yeats museum. Vermeer’s austere ‘Woman Writing A Letter, With Her Maid’.
The deep chioroscuro of Caravaggio’s ‘The Taking Of Christ’, Jesus’ hands clasped not so much in prayer as resistance against the human urge to strike out at those who assail him. The strange neo-surrealist religiosity of 16th and 17th century Italian painters like Navarette and Lanfranco. El Greco’s haunting and quite mad ‘Vision of St Francis’.
As I write, the National Gallery is hosting an exhibition of the illustrations Harry Clarke provided for a 1916 edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales. Clarke was of course a titan in the world of Irish arts and crafts. His beautiful stained glass work was on public view in Bewley’s cafe on Grafton Street for many years, and his illustrations of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe stories are the apex of the icky gothic. Somewhere between art deco, art nouveau and French symbolist, with a sizable dollop of Aubrey Beardsley, Clarke, along with Stoker and le Fanu, is one of the chief architects of the old weird Hibernian.
The current exhibition of Andersen illustrations is by turns ornate (‘The Nightingale’), dramatic (‘The Wild Swan’), graceful (‘The Elf-Hill’) and downright macabre (‘The Travelling Companion’). You can pick up a gorgeously designed hardback catalogue book for a paltry tenner. And if the aches and pains of climbing all those stairs get too much, you can take a seat and peruse your purchase over a bowl of vegetable soup and a coffee chaser to the tune of a fiver in the Gallery restaurant.
You can’t put a price on the imagination. Some stuff really is recession proof.