"The river courses through the city / turning concrete roadways to canal banks / that shrug their shoulders into dark water; / a man rises, seal-like in his caul of silt, to wave." - from Liffey Swim by Jessica Traynor. Congratulations to Melissa Corbally and Ken Dent, winners of this year’s Liffey Swim. Almost 500 people took part in Saturday's race, a 2.2km swim through the city centre which took competitors under 11 bridges, from the Rory O'More bridge near the Guinness Brewery to Custom House Quay. Here, Jack B. Yeats captures the excitement of the 1923 race, in which just thirty-four competitors took part. Yeats famously won a silver medal for this painting at the Paris Olympics of 1924, and if any of you visited our Library and Archive display last Friday for Culture Night, you may well have seen that medal and his participants’ medal (and perhaps even held it!). Image: Jack B. Yeats (1871-1957), The Liffey Swim, 1923. #NationalGalleryIRL #JackBYeats #LiffeySwim #IrishArt #Olympics #Liffey #Dublin