As Roy Foster comments in his biography, there is a hollow ring to the end of Yeats's late poem, ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’. It is a preposterous notion that Yeats might be judged not for his books, but ‘in the roll-call of his acquaintance’. The poem reflects upon the portraits and history paintings hung in the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, a collection which celebrated the cultural and political history of the newly independent nation. Yeats alludes in passing to the portraits of Casement, Griffith, and Higgins, and paintings by Lavery, Keating, and Orpen, but it is finally ‘we three alone’ – Gregory, Synge, and himself – whose contributions to the making of the modern nation he comes to extol. The poem closes with what Foster describes as ‘an implicit epitaph for himself, and his own assumption into the heroic frieze of portraits’. To look upon the portraits of Gregory and Synge, Yeats suggests, is also to look upon his own portrait.