Ann Griffin-Bernstorff is best known for her imaginative and idiosyncratic works. Born and raised in Limerick, Ann won the prestigious Taylor Art Scholarship in 1963 which allowed her to extend her education in France and study at the Atelier Yves Brayer and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Later she returned to Dublin where she trained and worked as a picture restorer for five years until she met her late husband Count Gunner Bernstorff of Denmark.

Her approach to her work is both methodical and measured, unsurprising for an artist who identifies with early Flemish artists and also American portrait painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her paintings of children convey a debt to these American artists with their portraits of plump, pale figures and large, flat faces peering out from elaborate clothing. Ann also admires and is influenced by the work of Botticelli, the Italian primitives and the Limbourg Brothers, Dutch medieval miniaturist painters active in early 15th Century France. Her imaginative and unique works which are painstakingly researched to be as historically accurate as possible appear naïve at first. However on closer inspection one sees the elaborate and stylised costumes of her subjects and the rich allegory of the works. Inspiration and reference for these compositions comes from Anne’s fascination with history and her important collection of antique textiles, costumes and dolls housed in a museum at her magnificent Georgian home in County Wexford, Ireland.

Ann has just recently finished researching and executing fifteen paintings which are the basis of the Ros Tapestry project www.rostapestry.com These works depict the early Norman history of the town of New Ross, Co. Wexford, founded in 1207 by William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke. This unique project is reckoned to be one of the largest series of embroidered tapestries ever made in Europe.

Ann’s work is to be found in the following Irish public collections: the Office of Public Works, National Self Portrait Collection, University of Limerick and the Lambert Modern Art Collection, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, Dublin.

She has exhibited widely in Dublin, Wexford and Derry and internationally in London, Chicago, New York and Miami. She held her most recent solo exhibition in the Peppercanister Gallery in November 2006. Ann’s work also appears in private collections in Ireland, UK, Denmark and USA.