The harp that came before the country

Here's one that changed how I look at a pint. The harp on the side of a Guinness glass is older than Ireland's own national emblem. Guinness trademarked it in 1862, decades before the Irish Free State existed at all.

So when the new government wanted to use the harp as an official symbol in 1922, they ran straight into a problem: Guinness had got there first. Their fix was simple. They flipped it, so the state's harp faces one way and the one on your pint faces the other. Meanwhile the brewery itself has been sitting on the same patch of Dublin since 1759, when Arthur Guinness signed a lease for nine thousand years at £45 a year. Guinness is still brewed there today.

I painted a pint for the newest addition to the travel poster series, shamrock worked into the froth. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: A Pint of Guinness, Dublin · Travel Poster