On the fringes of the Wexford Opera Festival, a 20-year tradition was maintained last week which brings to the county the work of many of the best living visual artists in the country.
The annual group exhibition held by Kelly's Hotel in Rosslare has become one of the major shows of modern or contemporary Irish art outside the urban galleries, and it attracts art lovers and buyers from near and far.
Ms Joan Lambert is curator of this significant exhibition which was instituted originally to extend the scope of the opera festival and tap into the potential of its large visiting audiences.
"In 1976 we decided to bring the festival out to Rosslare," she says. The aunt of hotel proprietor, Mr Bill Kelly, in organising the annual show she has visited almost all of the country's working artists and has a wide knowledge of their work.
To be selected by her for inclusion in the hotel's festival show has become recognised as an important endorsement, and this is reflected in the crowds which attend the opening, many of them returning year after year. for this event.
Seventy painters and sculptors are represented in this year's exhibition, many of them well-known names in contemporary Irish art. But Ms Lambert makes a point of encouraging new talent. "I have two `beginners' every year, and always a local artist," she says.
The 164 works put on show in the corridors and lounges of the hotel also include a strong Northern representation, artists such as Basil Blackshaw, Ross Wilson, Brian Vallely and Neil Shawcross.
If it is unusual to hold a commercial art exhibition in such a venue, the hotel's extensive permanent exhibition is even rarer.
Hung throughout the public spaces and also in the bedrooms is a collection of original Irish and English paintings of the last half-century, and even some graphic works by Picasso and Miro.
It is a collection built up over some 40 years and is now one of the more significant of its kind outside public galleries. The opportunity to view some of the best visual art of recent times certainly adds to the attraction of the small village of Rosslare, a popular holiday resort for many years.
The Kelly's Hotel permanent collection owes much of its inspiration to an innovative Arts Council scheme in the 1960s aimed at lending out the work of Irish artists for display in places where it would be accessible to the general public.
In 1978 Ms Breda Kelly, mother of Mr Bill Kelly, offered to buy all the works then on show in the hotel from the Arts Council. The deal was clinched, with the condition that the works would remain on public display. The collection thus begun has been expanded down the years, and guests now drink or dine surrounded by an impressive panoply of original paintings and sculptures.
A family business which started over 100 years ago as simple timber-panelled tearooms beside Rosslare Strand and has been built up by four generations of Kellys has become the most important repository of art in the south-east.