Exhibition: James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ – The City as Character

National Gallery of Ireland, 4 April – 15th July

This exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland brings together sixteen atmospheric works from the Gallery’s collection. It features paintings and watercolours by Walter Osborne, Rose Barton, Jack B. Yeats and William Orpen which give a sense of the city of Dublin as a character in itself. The fifteen short stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners depict a down-at-heel city populated by frustrated citizens. Most of the stories were written in Trieste around 1905, although ‘The Dead’ was finished in 1907. The rough language and allusions to sexual activity contained in a number of the stories meant that potential publishers shied away from it. On May 5, 1906 Joyce wrote to the London publisher Grant Richards defending his refusal to compromise his text and