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 a quay where the river trade was counted and charged, and if you look at the paving in front of it you are standing on what was a channel of the Lee with ships tied up along it. When the customs men moved downriver, 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 1884 William Horatio Crawford, of the Beamish and Crawford brewing family, paid to extend it, and the following year it took his name, the Crawford School of Art. The painter Daniel Maclise and the sculptor John Hogan had both trained at the earlier Cork school before they left to make their names in London and Rome, and 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 of the Vatican, made in the workshop of the sculptor Canova and originally a papal gift to the Prince Regent, was sent from London to Cork, on the grounds that the Regent had nowhere to put them. The Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere, the Belvedere Torso, full size and white as bone. Students drew from them for a hundred years. They stand here still, a room of plaster 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 in full, with a modern extension by the Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat added in 2000. The collection runs from the casts and Hogan's marbles to 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 now, including Harry Clarke's stained glass and the drawings behind it. 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 the doors open. Entry has always been free, which is the point. The Crawford was built to teach, not only to display.

One thing to know before you go: the gallery closed in late 2024 for the biggest rebuild in its history and is not due to reopen until 2027. In the meantime the building is behind hoardings, the collection is out on loan around the country, and the café is closed. Check the gallery's own site before you plan a visit around it.

On the walk

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