The RHA gallery in Dublin is currently home to an exhibition of paintings and etchings that are the result of what the art critic of The Irish Times, Aidan Dunne, recently described as "an extraordinary patronage agreement". The background to the agreement involves a generous patron, a leading artist of considerable and widely-recognised talent, and a rare opportunity for this State to acquire a unique and powerful collection. If the opportunity is not seized it will be a serious disservice to the arts - in particular the visual arts - in this country.
The creation of the collection, Episodes from the Passion, represents over twelve years of work by Hughie O'Donoghue - a Manchester-born painter of Irish descent now living in Kilkenny. Funding from an American businessman, Mr Craig Baker, allowed the artist to commit himself to such an enormous and long-term undertaking. The remarkable quality of the work has been much praised in this country and elsewhere: the expert eye of Grey Gowrie has seen in it the "qualities of Turner in his oils and of Rembrandt in the extraordinary drawings". The critic Dorothy Walker described some of the earlier work in this cycle as "Wagnerian in scale and scope".
Mr Baker has presented the work on long-term loan to the State - for this gesture and his role as benefactor to the artist he must be applauded - and it is now in the care of the Office of Public Works. Whether the donation becomes permanent depends on whether the State can find a suitable home. A highpowered committee is in place to seek such a space and it must be hoped that they succeed in this challenge sooner rather than later. When the current RHA exhibition ends it appears the collection will be dispersed and various works from it hung separately in a number of different State venues - including some abroad. However, the power and scale of the sequence, its impact as a major work of art and the extent of the artist's ambitions, demand that it be kept intact and located in a single environment.
The OPW does not have the easiest of tasks in locating a permanent exhibition residence, spacious enough to accommodate work on such a grand scale. But the maintenance of these paintings as a single body of work is as worthwhile a millennium project as some already suggested and publicised. Indeed what could be a more fitting way to mark the millennium than the installation of such a magnificent meditation on the central images of Christian iconography. And it is difficult to imagine that this collection, housed somewhere in its entirety, would not be successful in drawing large numbers of viewers.