I was privileged to be the wedding photographer for the first wedding to take place at Ireland’s National Gallery in Dublin.
I’m grateful for choosing me as the photographer for so special Wedding on Thursday, 1st September 2011.
What a venue!
No 5 at the National Gallery of Ireland is in the heart of Dublin’s cultural quarter, on Merrion Square. The house was restored to its Georgian glory between 2005 and 2008, and is full of splendid historic furniture and paintings from the national collection.
As you step on the red carpet and through the magnificent doorway, you realise that this is the perfect venue for a wedding that blends intimacy and elegance: great stairway, exquisite neoclassical plasterwork, magnificent chandeliers, gilded and painted ceilings, Egyptian columns, and splendid mantelpieces.
Wonderful backdrops for wedding photographs
And, of course, the photographic backdrops are hard to rival – whether in No 5 at the Gallery, out on Merrion Square, or in Merrion Square Gardens across the street.
After the civil ceremony, there was a great dinner. Then we went outside – to the delight of passing tourists. While I took photos of the bride and groom, and some of the wedding party, tourists took photos of us. Meanwhile, people walking on the street were infected by the wedding mood, and responded with smiles – and the usual Dublin wisecracks.
Amid all the doom and gloom these days, it was a happy day, with a magic all its own. Even when I’m doing my professional job and taking the best wedding photographs I can, I still enjoy myself. It was great to work with Newlyweds and the wedding guests were also great fun – not to forget the staff in the gallery who made the event such a success.
Perfect as a (wedding) picture
When visiting the National Gallery over the past months, I noticed a few paintings of weddings.
There’s the ‘Peasant Wedding’ by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, ‘The Marriage Feast at Cana’ by Jan Steen and, of course, one of Ireland’s most famous paintings, the huge ‘The Marriage of Aoife and Strongbow’ by Daniel Maclise.
The last one is a gloriously romantic depiction of the marriage of the Norman invader Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, known better as Strongbow, to the Irish Princess Aoife Mac Murrough in 1170 (numerous kings of England are descended from her, as well as some Scottish kings and the Irish nobles, the Earls of Kildare, Ormond and Desmond).
This wedding wasn’t quite on the scale of that of Princess Aoife and Strongbow; it wasn’t quite as religious as Steen’s marriage feast at Cana, but it was rather more elegant than Brueghel’s Flemish peasant wedding. Anyway, I’m glad that I just had to photograph rather than paint it!
It was also a privilege to be part of the celebrations. So I’d like to thank Newlyweds, their families and the terrifically helpful and kind employees of the National Gallery for a great day.
And I’m very proud now to be accredited by the National Gallery as a wedding photographer.
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