September 2008
Last month, we opened an exhibition of exquisite Mughal miniatures from the
Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, which my copy of the Blue Guide: Ireland describes in measured prose as "one of the world’s more important collections of Oriental art and MSS [manuscripts] - and of Western books and MSS." Until recently, I used to call it the best kept museological secret in Europe. Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (below) was an American mining millionaire who, following his wife’s death from typhoid fever and suffering from ill health himself, moved to Egypt where the climate suited him and where he began to acquire manuscripts - the beginning of a sixty-year quest that would result in the collection described above.
 Beatty originally intended that his collection would go to the British Museum (he maintained residences in both London and Dublin), but he fell out with the director and, in 1953, offered it to the Irish government. As the story goes, when the Irish government had accepted his offer, Beatty asked Eamon de Valera, then prime minister of the parliament, what size of operating endowment the government would like. In other words, he was planning to give enough money to run the new library indefinitely in what was then the youngest and poorest new state in Europe. In a sentiment that brings chills to my directorial spine, de Valera responded, "when a man gives you a horse, you don’t ask for the hay to feed it." So, for many years, this priceless treasure was housed in an unassuming building complex in the posh Dublin suburb of Ballsbridge - some distance from the National Museum with its many historical riches, the National Gallery of Art, and Trinity College with its related treasures, the medieval Books of Kells and of Durrow.
But the library is no longer such a wellkept secret. A few years ago, it was moved to new quarters in Dublin Castle in the carefully restored and extended early nineteenth century clock tower building, where it now has the elbow room to present the full range of its collections, which, it is hardly an exaggeration, comprise just about the complete history of writing around the world. The Mughal miniatures we are showing represent only a tiny fraction. These kinds of miniatures, highly detailed and almost cinematic in their use of space, are the result of many specialists’ work. You can read about these techniques in learned books, of course, but if you like murder mysteries (and perhaps even if you don’t), I heartily recommend Orhan Pamuk’s magical My Name Is Red. It’s set in a miniaturists’ atelier in Ottoman Turkey, and I learned as much about miniature painting - its hierarchies and techniques - as anything else.
One thing the DIA has in common with the Chester Beatty Library is the lack of an adequate operating endowment, but where the Irish have benefited from membership in the European Union and seen unprecedented development in the public and cultural arenas, the DIA has seen most of its public support disappear over the past decade. We are now almost entirely dependent on private, foundation, and corporate generosity. General operating endowment is always the most difficult to raise money for, but this is especially the case in Southeast Michigan, where Henry Ford set the tone with his attitude that giving to endowments equates to loss of control and "makes people lazy." That’s why your support is so important to us now. If you’d like to know more about supporting the DIA’s endowment through such means as estate planning, please get in touch with our development department (313.833.1851), where there are specialists who know how best to tailor planned gifts for your own circumstances.
Graham W. J. Beal
Director
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