At the Crawford Municipal Gallery director Peter Murray rejoices in the support of Project Management for his Figure and Ground exhibition (from today).

"The company got straight into it," says Murray. No wonder: "it" is a collection of Dutch works on paper, including five Rembrandts and 19 Mondrians and drawn from the leading Dutch museums as well as Chatsworth House in England and the Irish National Gallery.

These 60 artists from 1520 to 1920 are linked through what Murray calls "a pragmatic economy of approach", and are expressive also of social, political and economic connections between Ireland and The Netherlands. "I thought this would be an opportunity to see the close relationship between us in terms of husbandry, history, the life of the common people, and the response of the artists to those circumstances, both in terms of realism and abstraction."

The works are selected for their simple, direct images, where the action is focused. Rembrandt's drawings combine the everyday with the wonderful, according to Peter Murray's catalogue essay, while Piet Mondrian forms a logical conclusion.

Cork has Dutch connections, too: its waterways were built over in the 18th and 19th centuries using reclamation techniques perfected in The Netherlands. Several civic buildings from that period were strongly influenced by Dutch architecture, and the Crawford Gallery itself retains something of that style.

But extensive plans for the James Barry exhibition in October have had to be reduced. "Another €100,000 would be wonderful," says Murray, who has had to scale back the re-creation of the epic Barry murals for the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts; this will still be a feature, but on a smaller scale because the €100,000 grant from Cork 2005 is unsupported by anyone else so far.