I’m always surprised and fascinated when I come across stories and artefacts about Ireland in museums far from Ireland. Growing up in rural Ireland, it sometimes felt like that was the entire world of Ireland. Dublin felt far away and, even though emigration was most definitely a thing, it felt like the world of Ireland was limited to the rural world around me.

That’s obviously not true - and even in the rural areas, there are still fascinating stories and histories to be found. So it’s always interesting to discover how these stories have been recorded in faraway places.

So, like my Eurovision in museums post, I’m starting an occasional series when I find Irish stories in museums.

In the City Museum of Weimar in Germany, I saw a drawing of the tomb of Anna Dillon, who is buried in the city’s historical cemetery.

Anna Dillon was a lady-in-waiting to Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna. Born in Dublin in 1759, she moved to Weimar from Saint Petersburg in 1804-5 when Maria Pavlovna, daughter of the Russian Tsar, married Charles Frederick, the Hereditary Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.

She died in 1823, with her tomb designed by architect Clemens Wenzeslaus Coudray, which was modelled on an Ancient Roman sarcophagus.

This outfit is by Irish fashion designer Simone Rocha from her 2025 spring / summer collection. I saw it in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, in an exhibition about the Titanic and fashion.

It was highlighted there as an example of contemporary fashion looking to the 1910s for fashion inspiration.

One of my favourite exhibitions in 2024 was Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

There, I saw up-close The Liffey Swim, a wonderful painting by Irish artist Jack B. Yeats. In the Paris Olympics of 1924, it won a silver medal (art was once part of the Olympics). The painting depicts an annual swim in the river that flows through Dublin, full of fluidity and detail.

One thing I enjoy about working at Europeana is being able to write about Irish stories from time to time, often from a European perspective. Here are three of them:

Thank you for reading + until next time,