One may peruse in vain volumes of famous quotations and find precious little in praise of Ireland by its own most famous authors, whose sad, tough love for their native land was always being crashed on the rocks of history. James Joyce (below), the willing expatriate who never returned to Ireland, spat, “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow,” while Yeats in his day insisted Ireland’s romantic past was already “dead and gone.” George Bernard Shaw was most sanguine when he said, “Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.” Oscar Wilde somewhat less so: “We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.” Poet and rebel Padraic Pearse sounded barely hopeful after the failure of the 1916 rebellion in Dublin when he insisted, “You cannot conquer Ireland. You cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win by a better deed.”

      Eventually, Ireland proved him right and did win its independence, entering the modern world on bandy legs until well after World War II (it didn’t help that Ireland declared neutrality and extremist elements of the IRA worked with German intelligence against the British). Yet, despite being sentimentally overly characterized as a shamrock green land of leprechauns and fiddlers, modern Ireland’s true spirit is most manifest in the capital city of Dublin, which today is one of the most splendid and certainly most deeply cultural cities in Europe. I suspect that if Joyce and the rest were alive now, their sentiments would be far more positive, even swell with pride in what the last two generations have achieved. (Indeed, all those authors now have their monuments dotted around Dublin, and Pearse even has his own museum [right].)

      The city has never looked better, especially since the disruptive gash of construction to entrench the center’s tram system is now gone. Most of the  city’s new construction is happening north of the Liffey River, long the poorest and derelict neighborhoods. The new glass-and-steel bank and office buildings show no more architectural distinction than do any other European cities’ and hardly fit in at all with Dublin’s architectural traditions.
     Yet, the north, reached across the happy Ha’Penny Bridge, has come to life on its own, with a whimsical statue of Joyce right there on the main drag of O’Connell Street (left).  There are still commemorative bullet holes in the walls left over from the Easter Rebellion of April 1916 and the famous Post Office defense site is well worth visiting. St. Mary’s Church has been saved by being transformed into a vast pub and restaurant called The Church on Jervis Street, where you may pat the bronze pate of porter-maker Arthur Guinness, whose presence is felt on every corner of the city. Farther along there is now the 390-foot stainless steel Spire of Dublin, which no one sees the significance of beyond replacing an 1809 pillar topped with British Admiral Horatio Nelson, whom the Irish loathed and who the prescient Irish poet Louis MacNeice said was “watching his world collapse.”
    Dublin Castle in southwest Dublin dates (after a devastating fire) to the 17th century, with state apartments and St. Patrick’s Hall.
    The best way to get around town is with a Hop-on/Hop-off bus ticket,  discounted if you book on-line. The route runs for one hour 45 minutes and 26 stops, with trained guides, stopping at all the city's top attractions, including Dublin Zoo, the Guinness Storehouse, Trinity College and EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum (of which more in a moment), along with sites where Joyce, Wilde and Samuel Beckett (among others) lived.  (Buses for the tour start at 9 a.m. daily from outside Dublin Bus Head Office at 59 Upper O'Connell Street; the last tour of the day departs stop 1 at 5 p.m. during the Autumn/Winter and 7 p.m. during Summer.) Kids go free and there is free entrance to the delightful Little Museum of Dublin at St. Stephen’s Green, whence you can also take a fine, guided walking tour of this expansively beautiful public space. 
     The city’s other great green is Merrion Square, twelve acres of it, with a statue of a lounging Oscar Wilde (left) giving the passersby what is either a wry smile or a critical smirk. Ringing the Square are many of Dublin’s finest townhouses, hotels and restaurants. Incidentally, many of the once brightly colored Dublin doorways, made famous as a poster, have reverted to the historic black color they were before the 1960s ad promotion for the city. (I’ll report on Dublin’s hotels and restaurants in an upcoming column.)
      Hop on and off if you like, but Dublin has a small center and you can stroll around it in mere hours, unless you spend your time at the better-than-ever National Museum of archaeology and Irish history and the National Gallery, with its priceless The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio.  Trinity College (below) is so lovely and green this time of year, and its great Long Library is the magnificent home to the uniquely beautiful medieval Book of Kells, a new page of which is turned each day. (Tickets are necessary.)
      A little away from downtown is St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Jonathan Swift was Dean, and beyond that the Guinness Storehouse, with its rich history, superb exhibits and a vast, panoramic view of the city from the circular bar. There is also an Irish Whiskey Museum worth a visit.
      Downtown, the main thoroughfare, closed to cars, is Grafton Street (left), made famous in many Irish lyrics and songs, originally a connecting lane dating to the 1700s and once a high-end residential stretch. Since then it’s become a fashionable shopping street with as many international as Irish brands and those persistent street performers called buskers of various talents, which once included Bono. There’s a Molly Malone statue at one end—she of the “alive-alive-o” fishmongers’ ditty—and what was once called the Dandelion Market has become the wrought-iron multi-level  St. Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre.
      Perpendicular to Grafton Street are several smaller streets with a better selection of native Irish goods. (In fact, I saw several “out of business” signs in the windows of international fashion boutiques on those streets.) Some of the best include The Irish Store, The Woolens Mills and CLOTH Dublin. For unique Donegal tweeds and men’s and women’s country clothing, I always make a visit to Kevin & Howlin (right) on Nassau Street, across from Trinity, where each month brings entirely new colors and weavings of sturdy tweeds to last a lifetime, even in Irish weather.

     One of my favorite stops off Grafton is Sheridan’s Cheesemongers on Anne Street, which has become so successful that there are now branches in other Irish cities. There you’ll find small production Irish cheeses as nowhere else, with delightful names like Carrig Bru, Wicklow Bán and Drunken Saint.  And, if you’re going abroad, they’ll shrink-wrap the cheeses so as to be allowed through customs.

     Over the past twenty years the neighborhood known as Temple Bar, near the Houses of Parliament, has become a crucible for the arts and entertainment, with all the expected pubs and restaurants (the Auld Dubliner is a little quieter than some and has good music) that service locals and visitors, who are always heartily welcomed.  It’s a youthful area of Dublin, with the Ark Children's Cultural Centre and Irish Film Institute, along with the very fine Irish Photography Centre, the Gaiety School of Acting, IBAT College Dublin, the New Theatre.  The Cow's Lane Market is known for its fashion and design offerings on Saturdays.

      To put Dublin’s shadier past in perspective, the city has declared it will turn one of the last of what were called the Magdalene Laundries, on McDermott Street, into a museum showing the true horrors of a Church-run workhouse for women who strayed from the rules, some prostitutes, some pregnant out of wedlock, some nothing more than flirts turned in by their parents into a life of years of literal slavery in order to save their souls. Only now in Ireland could the thought emerge to preserve such a hellish place as a way of coming to grips with an unsavory past.

      Far more inspiring, however, is the new EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum (below), which, like the Titanic Museum in Belfast, is a state-of-the-art living museum of history focused on those who emigrated during the agonies of the potato famine of the 1840s, in which millions starved to death while millions more escaped to America and Australia on small transport boats, living below decks for weeks, even months. One of those boats, though a replica, is just outside the museum, called the Jennie Johnston, whose captain was among the most humane of his profession, whose thousands of passengers—five to a bunk—over several years all survived journeys in which sickness, storms and bare subsistence hung over everyone. Others on lesser ships had a good chance of never making it to their destination alive.

      Otherwise, within the museum there are thousands of hours of recording of immigrants, letters, a family history center, interactive touch screens, music and dance, with impressive walls of hundreds of famous Irish men and women, from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden, along with  Irish-Americans like Gene Kelly, Kurt Cobain, Walt Disney and John Ford, all presented as well as anything at Washington’s Smithsonian.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

                                                                  THE WHITE TERROR         

         Harry Balaton she already knew. She found out that the Russian oil magnate Igor Stepanossky, 54, had become very rich very soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, garnering multiple exclusive contracts for oil companies and transportation in Siberia. Stepanossky lived in St. Petersburg and owned a lavish apartment in Monaco, rarely leaving Europe, but quickly entered the art market, first buying minor works of 19th century French artists, then first-rate Impressionist art, and had amassed a considerable collection of works by the 20th century Russians—Kandinsky, Chagall, and Malevich (right)—but he had never bought any of 17th century Dutch masters.
         Nicholas Danielides was from a well established Greek shipping family that had acquired its artwork after World War II, including ancient Greek and Persian statuary, and his collection of post-war European and American art was of the first rank. It had long been suspected that much of his collection had been stolen by his father, perhaps bought from the Nazis, but as long as the works stayed in Greece, authorities asked few questions.  At only 43 years of age, Danielides was still a bachelor and considered very much a playboy, with the requisite yachts and homes all over the world, with his base in Athens.
         Jan Dorenbosch, 65, was the son of a Dutch businessman who was alleged to have had business with Germany during the war but was never convicted of any crime. There were even accusations—largely circumstantial—that his company’s researchers worked with their Nazi colleagues on the most horrific medical experiments done on concentration camp victims.
         Since then his son had attempted to keep the Dorenbosch name out of the newspapers and was as secretive about his art holdings as he was about his privately owned pharmaceutical company. He lived in Amsterdam.
         João Correa’s fortune came largely from destruction of Brazil’s rain forest, which was losing the equivalent of 200 football fields and more each day.  Not only did Correa, 40, provide the trucks, tractors and cutting machinery for the de-forestation but he also was South America’s largest producer of lumber.  He protected himself from further scrutiny by buying off politicians, philanthropy and supporting the arts, often with donations to museum from his own superb collection of South American and African works.
         Robert Loudon, 62, had inherited his immense wealth from his mother, who had founded the Lavande cosmetics company, with branches and laboratories in six countries, including France, Russia and China. Largely he devoted his time to philanthropy and his art collection, which focused on Medieval and Renaissance paintings and sculpture. In the art world he was considered very open about his collections, whose works he often shared with museums.  Nothing had ever appeared about Louden to suggest he had engaged in any criminal activities beyond a youthful penchant for orgies back in the 1970s at his Gramercy Park townhouse and villa in St. Barts.
         Katie saved Hai Shui for last, hoping the hypotheses that came out of the Fordham meeting would give her insight into the man. But there was very little on Shui in the Times archives or business magazines and only scattered references in the art journals. He was considered a very astute buyer with catholic tastes, though his Chinese art holdings were by far the largest in his collection. She did find that he was worth upwards of $7 billion, according to the Hurun Report, which kept track of the wealth of Chinese tycoons, placing him first among Taiwanese billionaires.
         As Prof. Lìu had said, many of the Shui families had settled in Taiwan in the early 17th century, during Vermeer’s lifetime.  From what Katie could gather, Hai Shui was now the most eminent member of his extended family, which began in the petroleum business before World War II, when Shui was a boy living in Beijing, at a time when Japan held Taiwan as a colony.  After the war, the Chinese Communists took control of the mainland, and in 1949 the remnants of the opposing Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek evacuated to Taiwan, when the Shui family moved back to the island.  For the time being, Britain had so far maintained control of Hong Kong. 
         Hai Shui became president and chairman of the board of the family business in 1980 and expanded its petroleum interests into chemicals, becoming immensely wealthy as Asia developed insatiable energy requirements, needed to fuel their developing economies.
         Katie put in a call to Prof. Lìu to ask if she knew anything more about the Shui family on Taiwan.
         “Not much, really,” she said. “They were among the two million soldiers, politicians, and business elite who emigrated to Taiwan after the communists took over the mainland. They all brought with them a tremendous amount of national treasures and grabbed up most of China’s gold and foreign currency reserves. Then civil war set in and Chiang Kai-Sheik’s Nationalists declared martial law on the island. It was called the ‘White Terror,’ and it’s estimated up to 140,000 people suspected of communist leanings were persecuted or killed. Martial law was not repealed until 1987.”
         “So, obviously, the Shuis were able to avoid the worst of that?”
         “They must have been very well connected to Chiang Kai-Shek (below), yes. I daresay they survived by cooperating with the Nationalists in calling out their own business competitors.”
         “And got richer because of it?”
         “Yes, they prospered and helped fuel Taiwan’s boom in the 1970s, when, after Japan, it became the second fastest growing economy in Asia. Being in petro-chemicals, the Shuis were very well positioned to become immensely wealthy.”

         As agreed, Katie shared her research with John Coleman, who in turn told Katie that most of Hai Shui’s art collection was Chinese sculpture, paintings, books, porcelain, jade, with a smattering of European art, mostly modern. Katie dutifully told Coleman about the “sui jen” connection proposed by Prof. Lìu, which the editor found farfetched.
         “I get what you say about the alchemy in the painting,” said Coleman, “but the rest really seems an overly imaginative stretch.”
         “It doesn’t impress you that the globe on the table just happens to be turned to China and the Chinese words are painted right next to it?” asked Katie. “From what I know of Renaissance artists everything in a painting had a symbolic meaning or reference.”
         “Yes, that’s true, and maybe those words are phonetic Chinese for ‘water’ and ‘gold,’ but pegging that to Hai Shui doesn’t really add up for me, just because the words and his name are similar. How about I quote you about the Chinese connection but not about Shui?”
         “Fair enough,” said Katie, “but I think the credit should go to the professors. I’ll give you their numbers if you like.”
         “And that won’t compromise your story?”
         “John, I haven’t got much of a story yet. I’m not doing a scholarly paper on the painting.  I’m seeing where all this goes and where it ends up. You’re reporting the news.”
         “Well, thank you for that. Let’s keep in touch. I’ll let you know if I hear anything from the mystery woman.”
         “I don’t suppose the mystery woman will speak to me?”
         “That I doubt. She said she was only speaking to me at this point.”
         “Well, with all due respect,” said Katie, “why is she telling only Art Today rather than first go to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal?”
         “I don’t know and I don’t ask. As long as Art Today keeps breaking these stories, I’m happy.  I’m sure she knows how to reach the Times and the Journal—”
         “—And McClure’s,” Katie inserted.
         “And McClure’s. They’ll all stay titillated without any inside access, which sure makes me look like the big cheese in the art media. I can live with that.”