Highlanes Gallery - Drogheda Municipal Art Collection

Upper Gallery
4 - 30 May, 2012

A selection of work from the Drogheda Municipal Art Collection featuring key work on the theme of Drogheda will be on display this May.

The earliest paintings to be exhibited in this display are View of Drogheda from Ballsgrove and View of Drogheda both c.1753-1758 which were painted by the Neapolitan painter Gabriele Ricciardelli, and capture the town in all its splendour in the eighteenth century. There are also nineteenth century views of Drogheda and the surrounding region, in works such as The Bathe House, 1823 by Robert Armstrong, Drogheda from the Railway Station and Slane Castle both 1849, by Anderson Paisley and St. Mary’s Bridge, Magdalen Tower, Monasterboice Tower and Melifont by Laurence Fagan from c. 1860.

Fagan, along with other artists, was interested in the distinctive viaduct and produced an engraving of a pen drawing on paper titled The Boyne Viaduct in 1860. Henry Roper-Curzon and, later, Simon Coleman and L.S. Lowry all feature the viaduct with the distant church spires, factories and wide Boyne river in their work, Boyne Viaduct, 1878, View of Drogheda from Highfield, 1967, and Drogheda, 1970, respectively.

The mace and the sword of state are precious heirlooms of Drogheda Borough Council, formerly the Corporation of Drogheda, and were given to the Corporation of Drogheda by King William (III) of Orange, shortly after the Battle of the Boyne, to replace the previous mace, which James II had melted down to enhance his depleted exchequer.