Designs for Belcamp House and Mount Vernon Finola O’Kane
The American Revolution of 1776 inspired many Irish landed gentlemen to hope that their own country might achieve the same political and economic freedoms as the young United States of America. Among them was Sir Edward Newenham, who built Belcamp House in North County Dublin in the early 1780s, describing it as a ‘delightful villa’ in a 1784 letter to Benjamin Franklin. He was also building a special ground floor room called ‘The States’ which looked eastward towards the Irish sea. It was nearly complete except for a niche that awaited the arrival of Benjamin Franklin’s bust. Newenham positioned busts of General Washington and the Marquis Le Fayette on either side of a bust of Virgil in some answering niches. This careful selection of ‘Revolutionary Worthies’ is pointedly reminiscent of the ‘Temple of British Worthies’ constructed by Henry Cobham at Stowe in Oxfordshire. At Belcamp, Newenham was building the ideal Irish revolutionary villa and populating it with a suitable set of model men. Stretching his implicit political agenda out into the landscape, he also built a temple to his hero George Washington with the
inscription: “Oh, ill-fated Britain! The folly of Lexington and Concord will rend asunder, and forever disjoin America from thy empire.” In the aftermath of 1776 many Europeans had continued to observe the novel experiment of the United States. As president and as the new nation’s most prominent model farmer, George Washington’s designs had become the focus of attention and emulation. In 1784 Washington wrote to Newenham describing his own delightful villa of Mount Vernon outside Alexandria, Virginia as a ‘retreat from the cares of public life; where in homespun and with rural fare, we will invite you to our bed and board’. This self-sufficient, modest and humble lifestyle was considered to embody all that European aristocratic life did not. When Washington wrote again to Newenham in 1787, he described why he considered Belcamp to be a model Irish version of the ideal American country house: ‘The manner in which you employ your time at Bell champ (in raising nurseries of fruit, forest trees, and shrubs) must not only contribute to your health & amusement, but it is
01 19th-century photograph of the Washington Memorial Tower across the lake on the approach to Belcamp (Source: Irish Architectural Archive) 02 Recent photo of Belcamp House, Co. Dublin