Colorful Hand-Me-Downs ...

.. worn by a family on the street in Dublin.  I complimented the father on the smaller daughter's generous coat, and with a smile  he said the clothes were all hand-me-downs. We paid an extended visit to the Hugh Lane Gallery, also called the Dublin City Gallery. It has a modest collection of Irish and other European art roughly since the mid-1800s, but its prize exhibit is utterly unique: Francis Bacon's studio. Bacon (1909-1992) was an Irish painter, working mainly in London, who became perhaps the leading figurative artist in Europe in the post-1945 period. He prided himself on painting in chaos, and his studio was indeed utterly chaotic. Although a homosexual, for the last two decades of his life Bacon "settled into a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards". Edwards gave the studio and its contents to the Dublin gallery; digital monitors provide innumerable links to all aspects of Bacon's life and the studio's sprawling contents. Our dinner was very non-Irish, in an excellent Vietnamese restaurant five minutes from our hotel.