It includes work by acclaimed figures in contemporary Irish literature such as Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann and Seamus Heaney. Each of the writers has selected a picture and used it as a setting-off point to explore ideas about art, love, loss, family, dreams, memory, places and privacy. Both the artworks and the literary responses to them are vibrantly diverse. The works range from paintings by old masters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, El Greco and Velázquez to pictures by Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard and Gabrielle Münter, and by Irish artists such as Jack B. Yeats, John Lavery, Gerard Dillon and Paul Henry. Published to mark the 150th anniversary of the National Gallery of Ireland, this beautifully illustrated book is edited by Janet McLean, Curator of European Art 1850-1950 at the NGI.