Crawford Art Gallery

The Crawford Art Gallery began as a place to tax ships, not to show art. The red-brick building on Emmet Place went up in 1724 as Cork's Custom House, on the quay where the river trade was counted and charged. When the customs men moved on, the city turned the building to a better use, and it has been Cork's public gallery for well over a century.

From Custom House to art school

In the 1830s the Royal Cork Institution took the building over, and in 1850 the Cork School of Design opened inside it. The school taught generations of Cork artists to draw and paint. In the 1880s the brewing family Crawford paid to extend it, and in 1885 it took their name, the Crawford School of Art. The painter Daniel Maclise had trained at the earlier Cork school before he left for London. The building runs through the story of nearly every Cork artist of the nineteenth century.

The Canova casts

The gallery's oldest treasures arrived before any of that. In 1818 a set of plaster casts of the great classical statues, the Vatican's antiquities reproduced full size, was sent from Rome to Cork. Students drew from them for a hundred years. They stand here still, a room of white gods and emperors that taught Cork to see, and they are the reason the city had an art school at all.

The gallery today

The art school moved to a new site in 1979, and the old Custom House became a gallery and museum in full, with a large extension opened in 2000. The collection now runs from the Canova casts and the sculptor John Hogan to the Cork-born painters Maclise and his peers, and the building stays free to enter. It stands beside the Opera House, a short walk off St Patrick's Street.

What it holds now is a real picture of Irish art. Alongside the casts and the sculptor John Hogan hang the Cork painters who came out of the school, James Barry and Daniel Maclise among them, and rooms of Irish work from the eighteenth century to the present day. The building keeps growing into the role: a glass-roofed gallery here, a restored stair there, the old Custom House quietly enlarged around its first purpose. For a city its size Cork has an unusually fine public collection, and it owes that to a customs building the city refused to waste and a brewing family who paid to keep it open. Entry stays free, which is the point. The Crawford was always meant to teach, not only to display.

On the walk

We pass the Crawford on Emmet Place and tell the story of the Custom House that became Cork's gallery, and the plaster gods that taught the city's painters their craft.