AN AGE OF ELEGANCE IRISH ART OF THE 18TH CENTURY

Page 1 14:30 24/10/07 Irish catalogue CVR

AN AGE OF ELEGANCE IRISH ART OF THE 18TH CENTURY

AN AGE OF ELEGANCE

Irish Art of the 18th Century

Preface

The study of eighteenth-century Irish art has been one of my lifelong passions.

Accordingly, it is a great pleasure to be able to welcome this handsome and scholarly publication which accompanies an exhibition of Irish art at the re-born Village of Lyons Demesne. Sadly we have to record the premature death of Tony Ryan. His passion for Irish painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been an inspiration to us all; his restoration of Lyons House and gardens is a remarkable achievement and his wit, enthusiasm and determination will be long remembered.

Since Anne Crookshank and I first turned our attention to the subject with the 1963 exhibition Irish Houses and Gardens, curated with James White and Desmond Guinness, a vast amount has been learnt and I am delighted to say that a new (and slightly updated) edition of Ireland’s Painters is very shortly going to press. The rebirth of interest in the subject perhaps started with the late Michael Wynne of the National Gallery of Ireland, who, amongst other things, pioneered the study of Thomas Roberts, our greatest landscape painter. Other contributors to eighteenth-century Irish visual studies who must be mentioned include Toby Barnard, Sergio Benedetti, Fintan Cullen, Nicola Figgis, Peter Murray, Peter Harbison and Homan Potterton.

Periodicals, most notably Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, publish the fruits of erudite scholarly pursuits, drawing attention to the field of the eighteenth-century visual arts. The Irish Arts Review has contributed valuable material on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish art history, while every year Apollo dedicates an issue to Ireland. It is particularly pleasing to Professor Crookshank and me that young scholars like William Laffan and Brendan Rooney have engaged so actively with the field; their forthcoming monograph on Thomas Roberts is eagerly awaited.

In addition, however, to these scholars, several dealers have contributed much to our knowledge, notably the late Cynthia O’Connor and her son Sir Robert Goff; James and Thérèse Gorry and Alan and Mary Hobart. In particular, Pyms Gallery’s scholarly

Left: James Malton, 1760-1803, The Portico of Parliament House, Dublin, Looking towards Trinity College

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catalogues on eighteenth-century paintings, publishing many new masterworks, have taken their place as useful works of reference and have influenced a number of important Irish collections. The same I am sure will be the case with this beautiful new catalogue produced by Mallett.

Mallett of course has long had an interest in things Irish. Their chairman is the distinguished Irish collector and the restorer of Castletown Cox, George Magan. Their CEO, Lanto Synge, is the great nephew of our eminent playwright John Millington Synge.

Some years ago, Mallett held a fine exhibition of Irish furniture at Newman House in Dublin and from their immaculate premises in Bond Street they have supplied furniture and paintings to many of Ireland’s collectors. On a personal level, I am grateful to Mallett for their support of the work of the Irish Georgian Society.

This exhibition is especially timely. I have long argued that a full display of our eighteenthcentury heritage is called for; not just painting, but silver, bookbindings, furniture, textiles, glass and delft. At the same time, some of our more astute cultural commentators – notably Robert O’Byrne – have pointed out the disparity in prices between ‘Ireland’s Old Masters’ and oftentimes rather secondary post-war paintings. Works by the great Irish artists of the eighteenth century are still comparatively underpriced and some of the most astute – or best advised – collectors have capitalised on this.

The present selection has opened our eyes to both familiar paintings and new discoveries.

The signed painting by Primrose Dean is a considerable rarity and, as such, Anne Crookshank and I chose it to illustrate the artist in our recent Ireland’s Painters. At the same time, the catalogue extends our knowledge, publishing for the first time a signed portrait of the great beauty Emma Hamilton, painted by Robert Fagan, by whom less than twenty pictures are known. In Ireland’s Painters we reproduced a magnificent William Ashford of Killarney formerly at Tyron Palace, North Carolina; here for the first time the larger and more complete prime version is unveiled – previously unknown both to scholars and to the art market. I myself identified the fine Barret – and, I must confess, tried to tempt it into Christie’s – and linked it with one of the drawings in the V&A sketchbooks.

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Irish art has long been associated with landscape; as early as 1767 Thomas Campbell – Dr Johnson’s friend – could write: ‘Some of the greatest artists have been bred here.

In Landskips, we have no competitors’, and in addition to works by Barret and Ashford, the selection here includes fine works by John Butts and Solomon Delane. The catalogue notes that both Delane and Dean, while on the Grand Tour, were admitted as members of the Florentine Academy. Irish landscape painting can no longer be seen as a provincial outlet of the British School, but as a distinctive and vibrant school in its own right, full of vitality and with a strong international dimension.

On a quite different note, the set of drawings by John Hutton for Dublin coaches is a considerable rarity, although I am pleased to say that the only other such drawing by this great craftsman is in my own collection! Perhaps the star of the show, however, is a further previously unknown picture, by George Nairn, showing the stables at Carton with the children of the 3rd Duke of Leinster. It is appropriate that the exhibition will be launched at Lyons, an estate so close to Carton, not only in terms of distance, but in its refined combination of landscape, collections and elegant living.

The collecting of Irish eighteenth century painting was pioneered first – and most ably –

by Richard Wood. Several others have followed in his footsteps and built quite remarkable collections of the fine and decorative arts. I must salute all the perceptive individuals who anticipated the great surge of interest in the subject and transformed town houses in Dublin and country estates such as Lyons, Abbey Leix, Charleville and Churchill, filling them with the treasures of past generations of Ireland’s artists and craftsmen.

Finally, I congratulate James Harvey and Mallett as well as Christopher Foley of Lane Fine Art for their discrimination in selecting such a fine group of Irish paintings from the eighteenth century and for the scholarship that has gone into the catalogue.

Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin

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Contents 8

GEORGE NAIRN ARHA

The Interior of the Stables at Carton

12 GEORGE BARRET RA

A Landscape with a Watermill

16 THOMAS HENRY WYATT

View of the Quadrangle of the New Liverpool Exchange

20 HUGH DOUGLAS HAMILTON

Portrait of Charles, 8th Lord Kinnaird of Inchture (1780–1826)

22 JOHN BUTTS

A Mountainous Landscape

24 HUGH PRIMROSE DEAN

A Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt

26 SOLOMON DELANE

A Landscape with the Flight into Egypt

28 WILLIAM ASHFORD PRHA

A View of Killarney with the Passage to the Upper Lake

34 SIR MARTIN ARCHER SHEE PRA

Portrait of Master George O'Connor of Castleknock

36 LUCIUS GAHAGAN

Portrait Bust a l’antique of King George III as Pater Patriae

38 JOHN HUTTON

A Set of Six Designs for Coaches

42 ROBERT FAGAN

Three-quarter-length portrait of Lady Emma Hamilton in her ‘Attitude’ as a Neapolitan Peasant

46 NATHANIEL HONE RA

Portrait of a Young Boy

48 PAUL SANDBY RA

A View of Enniscorthy, County Wexford, with Figures Unloading a Boat

50 JAMES MALTON

The Portico of Parliament House, Dublin, Looking towards Trinity College

54 JAMES MALTON

View of the Provost’s House and Trinity College, Grafton Street, Dublin

59 THE VILLAGE AT LYONS

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GEORGE NAIRN ARHA (1799-1850) The interior of the Stables at Carton, County Kildare; a liveried groom, Lord Charles William FitzGerald (1819-1887) and his sister Lady Jane Seymour FitzGerald

Inscribed with the initials and ducal coronet of the owner Also formerly inscribed on the original frame, ‘Fitzgerald’ Oil on canvas, circa 1825 Unframed: 28 x 45ain (71.1 x 115.6cm) Framed: 34 x 51in (86.4 x 129.5cm) PROVENANCE: by descent in the FitzGerald family

George Nairn was born in Dublin in 1799, and entered the Dublin Society's Schools as a boy of fourteen. Here his training was in draughtsmanship and classical art, with great emphasis on figure painting. He was to develop into a versatile painter, undertaking commissions as a young man for portraits, landscapes and animal studies, it was, however, in the latter field that he achieved his lasting success. Nairn was one of the founding exhibitors of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1826, where he showed a Group of Favourite Dogs. It was this genre which provided the backbone of his career. He exhibited such paintings regularly, and profusely, at the Academy until the year before his death, and was elected ARHA in May 1828.

There had been very little native sporting art in Ireland in the eighteenth century, but the demand for such paintings rose after the four extended visits of John Ferneley Snr. to Ireland between 1808 and 1812. The style which Ferneley established as the norm can be seen in the work produced in subsequent decades

Nathaniel Hone, Jason (private collection)

by Nairn. It is carefully observed and drawn accurately; without sentimentality, but full of charm and character. The careful observation of his human figures has echoes of JacquesLaurent Agasse. Much of Nairn’s work has been lost over the years, and he seems seldom to have signed his work: doubtless it is frequently attributed to better-known names. As Strickland notes, ‘he was an artist of considerable power, painting in the style of Stubbs’; equally Crookshank and Glin write ‘as Nairn’s work can be of very high quality, some may even now be attributed to Ferneley’.1 This exciting new addition to Nairn’s oeuvre must count as one of the most significant of all Irish sporting pictures. It is of particular interest as it shows the stables of Carton, county Kildare, one of the finest houses in Ireland. Portrayed in the stables are members of the young family of the Duke of Leinster, Ireland’s premier peer, Lord Charles William FitzGerald (1819-1887) mounted on his grey pony, and his sister Lady Jane Seymour FitzGerald.

James Seymour, Stables and Two Running Horses Belonging to the Duke of Bolton (Paul Mellon Collection, Upperville, Virginia)

1

Walter Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, 2 Vols, Dublin and London, 1913, vol. 2, p. 162; Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters, 1600-1940, New Haven and London, 2002, p. 200.

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GEORGE NAIRN The interior of the Stables at Carton

The relative paucity of equestrian art in Ireland has been noted. This is a great surprise given the long association between the country and the turf. Before Nairn, only the provincial Daniel Quigley made a career out of painting horses. However, the FitzGeralds of Carton were associated with some of the greatest equestrian art, and it is appropriate that such an important sporting image should have been commissioned by the family. Emily FitzGerald, long the chatelaine of Carton, had grown up a Lennox at Goodwood. Her father, the Duke of Richmond, was one of Stubbs’s most important patrons. Emily had commissioned from Thomas Roberts the famous portrait of her son Gerald’s pony (private collection) with an East Indian groom splendidly arrayed in ermine. Emily’s sister, Louisa Connoly, had commissioned the famous set of equestrian drawings from Robert Healy, for the adjoining estate of Castletown. Both the Roberts oil and the Healy drawings betray a similarity to Nairn’s approach here in the stress on the engagement between man and horse.

The tradition of horse portraiture is here charmingly embellished with anecdotal detail.

The playful dogs and cats in the foreground act as a foil for the still and dignified horses arranged, almost as a frieze, behind. The riding master giving lessons to Lord Charles is tellingly juxtaposed with his sister trying to teach tricks to her puppy. As noted above, Nairn, in addition to his equestrian work, enjoyed painting dogs and the deft characterisation recalls his Bull Terrier in a Landscape (private collection) recently on the London art market. The central horse in particular is typical of Nairn’s more frequent compositional structure of a single horse painted in isolation and can be well compared with his portrait of Lord Clonbrock’s famous Willsgrove (private collection).

The subject of stabled horses was a favourite of James Seymour and it is tempting to suggest that Nairn had seen works such as his Stables and Two Running Horses Belonging to the Duke of Bolton (Paul Mellon Collection, Upperville, Virginia) (fig). However this may be, the charm of the picture is wholly and characteristically Nairn’s own. The only other depiction of by an Irish artist of stables seems to be Nathaniel Hone’s Jason (private collection) although this shows the English stables of Sir Nathaniel Curzon (fig).

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GEORGE BARRET RA (c. 1728-1784) A Landscape with a Watermill

Oil on canvas Unframed: 19a x 23din (49.5 x 59cm) Framed: 26a x 30din (67.3 x 76.8cm)

Matthew Pilkington, who almost certainly knew the artist, perceptively noted how George Barret would work in different styles: ‘He had two decided manners of paintings, both as regard to colour and touch; the first was rather heavy in both, his latter much lighter’.2 His romantic landscapes of the 1760s are characterised by depth of greens and relatively free brush work, here he responds most closely to the Irish landscape and the aesthetic theories of his friend Edmund Burke. In addition, however, are more precise works such as this landscape with a watermill, where his approach to landscape is rather more domestic in feeling – certainly less monumental – and rather more in keeping with Burke’s definition of the Beautiful as opposed to the Sublime. The present fine work, previously unpublished, partakes of Barret’s two manners. It shows a finely delineated watermill, with figures to one side and cattle to the other outside a barn; overhead the sky is overcast and brooding.

Rustic landscapes such as this are less familiar than the verdant works of the 1760s.

Among the closest comparisons within Barret’s known oeuvre is a signed Landscape with Cattle, a similar mixture of humble buildings, cattle and figures.3 Even closer, in both conception and detail, is a drawing by the artist in the Victoria and Albert Museum (fig).

In works such as these, Barret’s inspiration is ultimately from the Dutch School. Writing to a young artist, he revealed his eclectic sources of inspiration, recommending the study of Rubens, Claude and Hobbema.4 Hobbema, in particular from the 1660s on, made something of a speciality of painting landscapes with watermills – and his work was available for the young Barret to study in the

house of his patron Thomas Cobbe.5 Even closer perhaps is the example of Hobbema’s master Jacob van Ruisdael whose influence on Barret has been specifically noted by Crookshank and Glin.6 It is tempting to suggest that Barret had seen some of Ruisdael’s Mill landscapes such as those currently in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, the Getty Museum and an especially similar one now in a private collection (fig) which seems to be the inspiration for this particular work.

Barret’s interest in artists such as Hobbema and Ruisdael echoes that of Gainsborough and there is also something here of the great English artist’s rustic landscapes.

Barret was born in the Liberties in Dublin in either 1728 or 1732. After a spell as an apprentice to a stay-maker, he attended the Dublin Society Schools under Robert West, winning a prize in the 1747 examination.

From the same year survives his earliest signed work. By 1755 when he signed and dated his Italianate Landscape (National Gallery of Ireland, on loan to Farmleigh House) he was clearly a highly accomplished and original artist, working in a light rococo style similar to Zuccarelli, who had recently been working in England. About five years later, probably under the influence of Edmund Burke’s thoughts and writings on the picturesque and the sublime, Barret’s style changed, becoming grander and more dramatic.

Barret left for London in 1763 bringing with him some of his Wicklow views. On route he passed through the mountains of North Wales sketching the famously picturesque scenery. One of his views of the Welsh mountains was praised in a letter from James

2

Matthew Pilkington, A Dictionary of Painters, 3rd Edition, London, 1798, p. 781.

3

Sotheby's London: Thursday, November 28, 2002, Lot 107.

4

MS letter in the Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York, quoted Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters, 1600-1940, New Haven and London, 2002, p. 136.

5

See Arthur K. Wheelock and Alec Cobbe, ‘”A Better Picture to the Christian Eye”, the Sale of Meindert Hobbema’s Wooded Landscape from Newbridge’, in Alastair Laing (ed.), Clerics and Connoisseurs, An Irish Art Collection Through Three Centuries, Exhibition Catalogue, English Heritage, London, 2001, pp. 87-89 and ibid., p. 116.

6

Crookshank and Glin, op. cit.

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13

GEORGE BARRET A Landscape with a Watermill

Detail of George Barret, c. 1728-1784, Landscape with Farm Buildings (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

Barry to Burke in 1765 and it seems he continued to visit Snowdonia throughout his career. The year after his arrival in London he exhibited a View of Powerscourt Waterfall at the Society of Artists. He was patronised by the Duke of Portland, for whom he painted ten views of Welbeck, Lord Dalkeith and the Duke of Buccleugh.

In 1768, Barret was appointed a founder member of the Royal Academy, although he soon fell out with many of his colleagues.

Despite his success, it seems he was incompetent in managing his money and Burke writes disapprovingly in a letter to Barry: ‘Barret is fallen into the painting of views. It is the most called for and lucrative part of his business’.7 By the end of the 1770s, he was close to bankruptcy but was supported in these straits by William Locke who paid his debts and commissioned a decorative scheme for Norbury Park to be executed in collaboration with Sawrey Gilpin, Cipriani and Benedetto Pastorini. Burke also came to the

Jacob van Ruisdael, 1628/9-1682, Landscape with a Water Mill (private collection)

rescue using his position as Paymaster General to appoint him official painter to the Chelsea Hospital. Barret died in 1784 and is buried in Paddington Green Church.

Mathew Pilkington who, as noted above, discerned Barret’s twin manners, gives an acute account of his art.

Scarcely any painter equalled him in his knowledge or execution of the details of nature, the latter of which was particularly light, and well calculated to mark most decidedly the true characters of the various objects he represented, forest trees in particular. … [H]e got all the richness and dewy freshness, that so particularly characterises the verdure of this climate, especially in the vernal months.8 If here Barret’s formal inspiration is ultimately derived from the Dutch School, it is combined with a close study of the verdant Irish countryside, making for a harmonious and elegant composition.

7

E. Fryer (ed.), The Works of James Barry, London, 1809, Vol. 1, p. 16.

8

Quoted by Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin in William Laffan (ed.), Irish Masterpieces, 1660-1860, Pyms Gallery, London, 1999, p. 24.

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THOMAS HENRY WYATT (1807-1880) View of the Quadrangle of the New Liverpool Exchange

Pencil, pen and ink, and watercolour with touches of white heightening on three joined sheets Unframed: 45a x 70in (115.6 x 177.8cm) Framed: 53a x 78in (134.6 x 198cm) Signed and inscribed, 'Thomas Henry Wyatt/77 Great Russell Street/London' (on the Paris Exhibition label on the reverse) and inscribed,'View of the New Exchange building/Liverpool/Thos Henry Wyatt/Architect/77 Great Russell Street London (Honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects) (And Past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects)', on an old label on reverse EXHIBITED: Paris, Exposition Universelle, 1878, part I, section 4, no. 168.

Thomas Henry Wyatt was born in Roscommon, the eldest son of Mathew Wyatt, a police magistrate. Born into one of the most distinguished of all architectural dynasties, his cousins were the architects Samuel and Benjamin, while he was a kinsman of the famous James Wyatt who had worked extensively in Ireland, providing designs for many of the great Irish houses including Castle Coole, Curraghmore and Slane Castle.

According to a family history published in the Architectural Publication Society’s Dictionary of Architecture, the family moved to England in 1818, when Wyatt was 11 years of age.9 After a private education in Brussels, Thomas Henry embarked on a career in commerce, but soon abandoned this for architecture and was articled to Philip Hardwick. Having entered partnership with David Brandon in 1838, he practised alone from 1851 until his death in 1880 at his home, 77 Great Russell Street.

Wyatt was closely associated with the Royal Institute of British Architects from its foundation. He was elected to the Council in

1842, became President in 1870, and was awarded the Royal Gold Medal in 1873. His extensive practice was mainly devoted to the building and restoring of churches, principally in Wiltshire, but amongst his notable secular commissions were Knightsbridge Barracks (1878-79) and the southern part of the Brompton Hospital, Fulham Road, London (1879-82). In Ireland, his church buildings include the design of St Bartholomew’s Church, Dublin, and the completion and restoration of St Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny.

Secular Irish projects included work at Lissadell, Co. Sligo and Palmerstown House, Co. Kildare, as well as Abbey Leix, Co. Laois, the interiors of which had been designed by his illustrious ancestor, James. C. H. Eastlake in his History of the Gothic Revival (1872) observed that Wyatt ‘steered a safe middle course between old errors and modern heresy’, and believed that the church of St Mary and St Nicholas, Wilton, for which Wyatt provided the design, was ‘the most important Anglican Church erected about this time [1843]’.10

Thomas Henry Wyatt, 1807-1880, The Quadrangle of the New Liverpool Exchange (Royal Institute of British Architects)

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16

Irish Architectural Archive, Biographical Index.

THOMAS HENRY WYATT View of the Quadrangle of the New Liverpool Exchange

Wyatt's Exchange Buildings in Liverpool, built between 1863 and 1867, replaced earlier buildings on the same site, probably erected by his kinsman James Wyatt, or John Foster the elder, in 1803-09. They surrounded on three sides an area known as the Flags; in the centre of the fourth side stood a monument to Nelson. Built in a style then known as 'French Renaissance', they contained 250 public and private offices, as well as a newsroom and stock exchange. No expense was spared in fitting out the interior; pilasters of red Scottish granite, marble pedestals and carved stonework from Caen abounded. The buildings also contained a novel invention known as a 'lift'. They were rebuilt by Gunton & Gunton in 1937.

Among the collection of Wyatt drawings at the Royal Institute of British Architects is a somewhat similar perspective of the Exchange, in pencil, inscribed ‘View showing quadrangle’ (fig).11 Exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, the size and virtuoso draughtsmanship of the present design must make it one of the most dramatic and impressive drawings by an Irish Victorian architect to have survived.

10

Cited in D. Linstrum, Catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects: The Wyatt Family, Farnborough, 1973, p. 19.

11

ibid., p. 47, fig. 81.

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HUGH DOUGLAS HAMILTON (c. 1740-1808) Portrait of Charles, 8th Lord Kinnaird of Inchture (1780 -1826)

Pastel on paper Unframed: 15 x 13in (38.1 x 33cm) Framed: 17d x 15ain (43.2 x 39.4cm) PROVENANCE: By family descent

This is a rare late pastel by Hugh Douglas Hamilton executed towards the very end of his life when he had returned to Ireland from Italy. Early in his career Hamilton had devised a popular – and lucrative – format of head and shoulders portraits in pastel. Like so many other artists trained at the Dublin Society Schools, Hamilton was highly skilled at working in chalk from an early age. Strickland defines these pastel works as ‘faithful likenesses, full of expression and charm’; Mulvany records his success with them: ‘He could scarcely execute all the orders that came in upon him and the writer has heard him declare, that in the evening of each day, a part of his occupation was picking and gathering up the guineas from amongst the bran and broken crayons, in the several crayon boxes, into which, in the hurry of the day, he had thrown them’.12 Among these early pastels are many of the Conolly family of Castletown and the FitzGeralds of Carton.

After a period in London, Hamilton moved to Italy where his style became more rigorously neo-classical; his subject matter extended to history painting as well as portraiture and he began to experiment more frequently in oil paint. However, he continued to work in pastel producing handsome portraits of the 4th Earl of Guilford (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Jonas Langford Brooke (private collection), and, of course, his most famous work showing Canova in his studio (Victoria and Albert Museum).

As with his later oils, Hamilton, reflecting the change in fashion of the turn of the century, largely eschews colour in favour of

a pared-back monochromatic elegance. If his later style is accordingly less decorative, it more than compensates for this in greater psychological acuity. This portrait of Lord Kinnaird, previously unknown, can perhaps be best compared with his oil portraits of Lord Castlereagh (Mountstewart, County Down), James Moore O’Donel (Ulster Museum) and Richard Edgeworth (National Gallery of Ireland); the last of these (fig), dateable to about 1800, shares with our work the forceful directness of the sitter’s gaze and a similarly robust approach to physiognomy. This dating on stylistic grounds can be confirmed by the approximate age of the sitter who seems to be in his early twenties.

Hamilton’s subject here is a Scottish aristocrat, Charles, 8th Lord Kinnaird, who married into the family of Ireland’s premier peer – the FitzGeralds of Carton, Earls of Kildare and Dukes of Leinster. Born on 12 April 1780, and educated at Eton and the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Glasgow, Kinnaird was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1799. He studied further at Geneva between 1800 and 1802, before taking a seat as Member of Parliament for Leominster in the latter year, being politically aligned with the Foxite whigs. On his succession to his father’s title, he was a Scottish representative peer from December 1806 to June 1807.

On 8 May 1806 Kinnaird married Lady Olivia Letitia Catherine Fitzgerald (17871858), youngest daughter of the 2nd Duke of Leinster and his wife, Emilia. Accordingly he is the uncle of the FitzGerald children shown in the stable of Carton in this same catalogue.

With Lady Olivia, Kinnaird had three sons and two daughters. In 1807 he began the construction of Rossie Priory in the Carse of Gowrie, Perthshire. Kinnaird travelled extensively on the continent and was an avid art collector, taking advantage of the sales of paintings dispersed during the Napoleonic

wars, notably that of Philippe Égalité, Duke of Orléans. He owned works by Titian, Poussin, Teniers and Rubens, as well as fine classical sculpture. Kinnaird died on 12 December 1826 in Regency Square, Brighton.13 Hamilton was an obvious candidate to paint Kinnaird after the latter’s marriage to Lady Olivia. He had first worked for the Kildares more than forty years earlier, collaborating on John Rocque’s survey of the family’s estate at Kilkea. Hamilton was to paint no less than four generations of the family including the 1st Duke’s mother and the 2nd Duke – the father-in-law of Lord Kinnaird. More specifically, Strickland records a portrait by Hamilton of Lady Olivia FitzGerald, Kinnaird’s wife. This fine pastel, then, is almost certainly connected with Kinnaird’s marriage into the FitzGerald family and can accordingly be dated quite precisely to about 1806, making it one of Hamilton’s very last recorded works. In his later years, Hamilton had largely forsaken art for the study of chemistry, clearly, however, he came out of retirement to portray this new member of Ireland’s leading aristocratic family, his loyal patrons since the earliest days of his career.

Hugh Douglas Hamilton, circa 1740-1808, Portrait of Richard Edgeworth (National Gallery of Ireland)

12

Walter Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, 2 Vols, Dublin and London 1913, vol. 1, p. 428. Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters, 1600-1940, New Haven and London, 2002, pp. 105-06 13

Source, Dictionary of National Biography.

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JOHN BUTTS (c. 1728 -1765) A Mountainous Landscape

Oil on canvas Unframed: 18d x 29in (46.5 x 73.7cm) Framed: 23a x 33ain (57 x 85cm)

The short-lived John Butts was one of the pioneering artists of the generation before William Ashford and Thomas Roberts (fig).

He was born in Cork and he was to immortalise his native city in the important View of Cork recently acquired by the Crawford Art Gallery. In addition, Butts taught the two greatest Irish artists of the century, Thomas Roberts and James Barry. The latter on his hearing of Butts’s death gave a poignant eulogy, in which he clearly identified many of his own frustrations with his fellow Corkonian.

I am indeed sensibly touched with the fate of poor Butts…who with all his merit never met with anything but cares and misery, which I may say hunted him into the very grave…His being bred in Cork excluded him from many advantages; this he made evident by the surprising change of his manner on his going to Dublin; his fancy which was luxuriant, he confined to its just bounds, his tone of colouring grew more variegated and concordant, and his pencilling, which was always spirited, assumed a tenderness and vivacity.14

John Butts, circa 1728-1765, Self Portrait, (Cork Public Museum) on permanent loan to the National Self-portrait Collection of Ireland, University of Limerick

Butts moved to Dublin in 1757 finding employment as a scene painter in Crow Street Theatre. In this he followed the example of William van der Hagen, Joseph Tudor, John Lewis and Robert Carver. However, if Pasquin is to be believed, his intemperate habits and irregular lifestyle forced him to take on menial jobs such as painting coach panels to support himself and his young family – and ultimately led to his early death.

Butts’s work is extremely rare and his small oeuvre is still being refined, a process made difficult by the variety of styles in which he worked – as noted by Barry in the quote above. Recently on the art market was his important work Into the Hands of the Shades, a highly personal take on Poussin’s Et in Arcadia

Ego, and which seemingly prefigures his own early death. The normally critical Pasquin, recognised Butts’s worth describing him as ‘one of the most brilliant artists that Ireland ever brought forth’ while Thomas Campbell

rated his work even as superior to that of Roberts and Ashford: ‘I have seen a picture

by Butts; whose fame here is above that of all the others, though his death was premature’.15 Crookshank and Glin have identified

several features in Butts’s style which are clearly evident in the present work: ‘The rocks are a typical feature in Butts’s work: they have striated cracks and are lumpish looking, as though pieces were about to break off’.16

Something of a hallmark motif of Butts’s work is the appearance and handling of the rather scrawny goats, very similar to those that appear in Into the Hands of the Shades.

15

Anthony Pasquin, Memoirs of the Royal Academicians and an Authentic History of the Arts in Ireland, London, 1796, p. 10. Thomas Campbell, A Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland…,London, 1778, p. 440.

14

E. Fryer (ed.) The Works of James Barry…Containing his Correspondence, 2 Vols (London 1809) vol. 1, pp. 200-01.

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16

Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters 1600-1940, New Haven and London, 2002, p. 131.

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HUGH PRIMROSE DEAN (c.1746-1784) A Landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Signed and dated 1770 on the reverse Oil on copper Unframed: 11ain (29.2cm diameter) Framed: 17ain (44.5cm square) LITERATURE: Anne Crookshank and the Knight

of Glin, Ireland’s Painters, 1600-1940, New Haven and London, 2002, p. 142, and illustrated as fig. 176

Hugh Primrose Dean’s paintings are of the utmost rarity – the National Gallery of Ireland, for example, does not possess an example of his work. This refined oil on copper, chosen by Crookshank and Glin to illustrate the artist in their recent Ireland’s Painters, is a key signed and dated work on which to attempt a reconstruction of his oeuvre. Together with James Forrester, Robert Crone and Solomon Delane, Dean was one of the highly talented group of Irish landscape painters who worked in Rome in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. He was singled out for praise in a letter by Father Thorpe of 1771: ‘Mr Dean, Delany and others here have their admirers and each a considerable share of merit in the landscape way and perhaps superior to any of the three of four Italians who have excellencies in the same branch’.17 Dean seems to have been originally from County Down. However, from an early age he was closely connected with Cork. Certainly his father later resided in Kinsale and, in 1758, Dean is recorded as living with his brother David at Castle Hyde. In 1761 he married at Christchurch in Cork City. Strickland notes that he probably studied in Cork but little is recorded of his early life until he emerges in London, exhibiting at the Society of Artists. It is possible that he travelled far afield from an early age as he exhibited views on the Danube and the Elbe – though these may have been taken from original drawings by another artist.

Dean is first recorded in Italy in 1768, having travelled there under the patronage of Viscount Palmerston. He quickly made a name for himself. As Thomas Jones, recalled in his Memoirs: ‘his fame flew him where ever he went – From Florence to Rome – From Rome to Naples and so back again – “Eco viene il grand pittore inglese” was the cry’.18 Despite a somewhat difficult temperament, Dean was a success in Italy, numbering Sir William Hamilton among his patrons. In 1777 he was

awarded the great honour of membership of the Florentine Academy, designated in the Schedule of Members as ‘Claude l’Irelandais’.19 His personal life was, however, less happy.

Dean had left his wife and child at home when he went to Italy. Unbeknownst to him Lord Palmerston sent them out to join him: ‘The artist happened to be standing at the door of the locanda where he was staying and when he saw a woman approach who was in difficulties, he offered to help. When he discovered that the lady was his wife, he fled to Vallombrosa where “he laid some days to recover his spirits”’.20 From Italy, Dean continued to send works to the Royal Academy while, on his return to London, a large transparency painting of the Eruption of Vesuvius was exhibited in a room in Covent Garden. This, Jones notes, ‘amused the publick successfully’ however, shortly afterwards he abandoned painting and became an ‘itinerant preacher’. Jones concludes his account: ‘the last account I had of him was, that he had sunk in the Oblivious, but useful Situation of a Mechanik in one of Our English Dockyards’.21 Crookshank and Glin have commented on the ‘close companionship of the Irish in Rome’ and noted the affinity between one of Dean’s works and that of his compatriot, James Forrester. This can be further evidenced by a comparison between two works included in the present exhibition, by Dean and Solomon Delane (see page 26). They both illustrate the Flight into Egypt, a subject beloved of Italian seicento artists, but rare in British and Irish art. The attraction of the subject matter for landscape painters has always been the outdoor setting which it necessitates. Dean and Delane shared lodgings in Rome and it is very tempting to see the two Irish artists painting their respective works – both on copper – in a spirit of friendly rivalry or emulation.

17

Quoted Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters, 1600-1940, New Haven and London, 2002, p. 138.

18

‘Memoirs of Thomas Jones’, The Walpole Society, vol. 32, 1946-48, London, 1951, p. 12.

19

John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, complied from the Brinsley Ford Archive, New Haven and London, 1997, p. 287.

20

Ingamells, op cit., 287, paraphrasing Edward Edwards.

21

24

Jones, op cit.

25

SOLOMON DELANE (c. 1727-1812) A Landscape with the Flight into Egypt

Oil painting on copper Unframed: 19a x 26ain (49.5 x 67cm) Framed: 25e x 32ein (65.5 x 83cm)

Solomon Delane was born in County Tipperary, the son of a Clergyman, Richard and his wife Sarah. He was brought up in Dublin, and received his training in the Dublin Schools under West, where he also attended the School of Landscape and Ornament under James Mannin. Delane won a prize at the Dublin Society in 1750, when he was placed second in the order of merit. About this time his father and brother Richard both died, leaving Delane with a comfortable income from a family portfolio of property in Dublin and elsewhere.

Soon afterwards Delane set out on his first Grand Tour to Italy, arriving in Rome in 1755. Much of the next fifteen years were spent in and around the Eternal City, where he developed a distinctive and highly sophisticated landscape style which owes more to the refinements of the seventeenth century, and particularly to Claude Lorraine, than it does to the Romantic topography of his own age. In 1763 he was elected a

Solomon Delane, circa 1727-1812, Italianate Landscape (National Gallery of Ireland)

26

member of the Society of Artists in London, and in 1766 was sending landscapes for exhibition at the Dublin Society of Artists. In July 1777 he was elected as a member of the Academia di Disegno in Florence – just a few months after his friend Hugh Primrose Dean had been awarded the same signal honour.

Two years later, Delane went on a painting tour of Germany with the Hon. Aubrey and Lady Catherine Beauclerk. Father Thorpe compared his work favourably to his compatriot James Forrester noting that Delane ‘contends with him for excellence and…is much more expeditious in his work.

I know of no one in Rome who is equal to either in this kind of painting’.

Delane was noted by many correspondents on the Grand Tour during the years to 1780, and he sold pictures to some of the most distinguished of them, including Nathaniel Dance's client Lord Charles Hope, the Earl of Upper Ossory and Hugh Percy Lord Warworth. The emergence of a group of Irish

Nathaniel Dance, 1735-1811, Portrait of Solomon Delane (Nottingham Castle)

painters in Rome, with Delane at its centre, was noted by James Martin: ‘Mr Delane is a Landskip Painter & has made good progress in his Art’; a week later Martin wrote further: ‘Mr Crone, Mr Delane and Mr Forester the only persons from our Part of the World who practice Landskip-painting are all Irish’. In 1780 he was back in London where he exhibited pictures at the Royal Academy between 1782 and 1784. Delane died in 1812, back home in Dublin where he had lived for the last two decades of his life.

Closely comparable to works by Delane in the National Gallery of Ireland (fig) and

in a private collection, the present painting shows the cool silvery tonality which is the hallmark of his style, ultimately derived from Claude. It is one of two known painters by the artist which are on copper, and may be dated to about 1772 when Delane was sharing accommodation in Rome with his fellow artist Hugh Primrose Dean. Dean also painted a Flight into Egypt on a copper support at about this date and, as discussed above, it is likely that the two works were painted by these Irish friends in Italy in competition one to another, with each showcasing a particular aspect of their art. No doubt, Delane’s attraction to this

particular subject was heightened by the fact that the Flight into Egypt had been a favourite of Claude and other classicising artists of the seventeenth century.

27

WILLIAM ASHFORD PRHA (1746 -1824) A View of Killarney with the Passage to the Upper Lake

Oil on canvas Unframed: 38 x 50in (96.5 x 127cm) Framed: 45d x 56ein (114.9 x 144.1cm) In its original carved and gilded Georgian frame EXHIBITED: Possibly Society of Artists, Dublin 1780, no 9 ‘A view in the passage to the Upper Lake’ LITERATURE: See George Breeze, Society of

Artists in Ireland, Index of Exhibits 1765-80, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 1985, p. 1 Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters 1600-1940, New Haven and London, 2002, p. 152

This painting, previously unknown to scholars and the art market alike, is a highly significant rediscovery of great importance for the study of eighteenth-century Irish landscape. It is the prime, and larger, version of Ashford’s wellknown work formerly in the collection of Tryon Palace, New Bern, North Carolina, and shows the passage to the Upper Lake Killarney (fig).

This is Ashford at his finest at the moment in the 1770s when he and Thomas Roberts, as young artists, were competing in a spirit of friendly rivalry to redefine the landscape school by the direct observation of Ireland’s scenery. An unusually large work in Ashford’s corpus, it must be accounted one of his early masterpieces.

William Ashford is, of course, one of the key figures in the rise of the eighteenthcentury landscape school of the 1760s onwards. Although born in Birmingham he was to spend his entire career in Ireland, ending it as the first President of the Royal Hibernian Academy. He came to Ireland in 1764 and initially followed a government career, being appointed Clerk to the Comptroller of the Laboratory of the Ordnance on an annual salary of £40. Ashford started to exhibit four years later, showing flower pieces and still lives at the Society of Artists in Dublin. From 1772, however, he started to exhibit landscapes, the genre to which he was to devote his life. Ashford met early critical success winning premiums from the Dublin Society and being noticed in London after showing at the Royal Academy in 1775: We don’t remember this artist’s name before in any exhibition; notwithstanding this, he is so far from being a novice in his profession,

that, if he is young and attentive, he may well expect to reach the first form, in this department of painting.22 Ashford’s technique developed enormously in the course of the 1770s culminating in works such as this view of Killarney of 1778 or 1779, and in 1778 Ashford was elected a member of the Society of Artists. By 1775 he was paid the large amount of £57 9s 3d for three views of Moore Abbey. Two years earlier, a recently published manuscript source gives a fascinating, and extremely rare, insight into the mind of an eighteenth-century Irish landscape painter.

Reverend Burrows, tutor at Dartrey, county Monaghan met Ashford who was painting the demesne.

I never expect to see a place’ Burrows writes, ‘which unites in it so many striking beauties.

For wood, water and simple unaffected Decorations, it far exceeds any thing my imagination could have formed. Mr Ashwood [sic], who is here to take some views of it, told me he could employ himself many years in painting the variety of its beauties, since every ten yards affords a new and pleasing landscape, and the horizon is every way bounded by such a fine wavey line of mountains, which come forward, retire backwards, or lose themselves in the clouds, in a thousand agreeable figures.23 It is this direct response to the Irish landscape that gives the work of Ashford and Thomas Roberts such vitality. After the death of Roberts in 1778 he completed the latter’s important series of views of Carton, which still hang in the house. In another work of the

22

Unidentified newspaper cutting Witt Library, London.

23

See Deirdre Conroy, ‘Dawson Grove, County Monaghan’, in William Laffan (ed.), Painting Ireland, Topographical Views from Glin Castle, Tralee, 2006, pp.156-58.

28

29

WILLIAM ASHFORD A View of Killarney with the Passage to the Upper Lake

William Ashford PRHA, 1746-1824, Killarney from Aghadoe (Richard Wood Collection, University of Limerick)

same year, also commissioned by the Kildares and now in the National Gallery of Ireland, the similarities between the two artists’ approaches are clear. The NGI work is itself a mediated recollection of Ashford’s very recent visit to Killarney, as the nave and east window of the monastic building in the centre seem to be inspired by Muckross Abbey.24 Of all the artists of the eighteenthcentury Irish landscape school, Ashford takes a particular pleasure in recording well-heeled tourists visiting Ireland’s beauty spots. Similar figures to those leaving the boat in the present work, appear admiring the picturesque views of the Dargle Valley (Royal Hibernian Academy) or the antiquarian remains of Cloghoughter Castle (Richard Wood Collection, University of Limerick) (fig). Killarney, however, was the ultimate destination for those seeking wild, untamed Irish landscape which Edmund Burke had popularised in his treatise, A

William Ashford PRHA, 1746-1824, Cloghoughter Castle (Richard Wood Collection, University of Limerick)

Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, which in the previous decade had greatly inspired the rather older George Barret.

A year or two before Ashford painted this view, Killarney was described by Louisa Conolly of Castletown: Beyond these beautiful high hills you see monstrous rock mountains, you then turn round an Island into Muckross Lake, where you coast along a rocky shore, that the water has made so beautiful that every rock pleases you….You then go thro’ a narrow channel into the Upper Lake, where you have the sublime in perfection.25 This is the very spot, the narrow passage between the lower and upper lakes, that Ashford depicts. The well-dressed visitors are brought ashore by attendants, one with a parasol to shield the sun; a fisherman looks

on, in a motif which rather recalls the work of John Butts.

Ashford exhibited Killarney views at the Society of Artists in London in 1778 (A View of the Entrance of the Lake of Killarney) and in Dublin from 1780 showing: Killarney from Aghadoe (fig), Innisfallen Island, Muckross Abbey and the Passage to the Upper Lake; the last of these is likely to have been either this painting or that formerly at Tryon Palace. The ex-Tryon Palace picture (fig) measures 27d x 39 inches; the present work 38 x 50 inches. The Mallett picture is also more fully resolved, Ashford enhances the balance of the composition simply by placing a fisherman on the central rock. There seems little compositional purpose to this rock if it is not intended to be occupied and, in general, Ashford favours a very balanced approach to his compositions which this figure imparts to the whole. In addition, the figures on the bridge and some of those

24

This is noted by Peter Harbison, ‘Our First President, William Ashford as Antiquarian Artist’, in Royal Hibernian Academy, One Hundred and SeventyThird Exhibition, Dublin, 2003, p. 25.

25

30

Quoted, Edward Malins and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, Lost Demesnes, Irish Landscape Gardening, 1660-1845, London, 1976, pp. 164-65.

31

WILLIAM ASHFORD A View of Killarney with the Passage to the Upper Lake

William Ashford PRHA, 1746-1824, A View of Killarney with the Passage to the Upper Lake (private collection)

on the riverbank are missing in the ex-Tryon Palace picture, demonstrating that the newlydiscovered work is the prime version. The Tryon Palace picture, though a work of very high quality, is a smaller and somewhat simplified replica. This is what gives such importance to the correct identification of the new work.

The great charm of the picture is the pleasingly balanced composition, the carefully modulated palette and particularly the soft Irish light falling on the verdure. This recalls an anonymous diarist’s assessment of Ashford’s work: ‘There is here abundant scope for an exertion of the artist’s genius in the delineation of foliage. The articulation is perfect and the colouring so beautifully rich, and various, that I could with pleasure have spent hours viewing them’.26 Certainly this newly-discovered masterpiece equally rewards such close scrutiny.

26

Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters 1600-1940, New Haven and London, 2002, p. 153.

32

33

SIR MARTIN ARCHER SHEE PRA (1769-1850) Portrait of Master George O'Connor of Castleknock, (1778 -1842)

Oil on canvas Unframed: 30 x 25in (76.2 x 63.5cm) Framed: 38 x 33in (96.5 x 83.8cm) In a superb carved and gilded Irish Georgian frame PROVENANCE: Painted circa 1786, and then by family descent until sold, Christies, 13th December 1912 (as by George Romney) for 720 Guineas; private collection, USA LITERATURE: W.G.Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish

Artists, Dublin, 1913

Sir Martin Archer Shee was born in Dublin on December 20th 1769, the son of a family originally from Kilkenny which subsequently moved to Co. Mayo. He was sent to school in Dublin and there first evinced the talent as a draughtsman which subsequently became his hallmark as an artist. He entered the Dublin Society’s Drawing Schools in 1781 at the age of twelve under the tutelage of Francis Robert West, where he won virtually all the medals and prizes for which he was entered, notably the medal for landscape (1782) and portraiture (1783). At the age of 16 or 17,

he set up his own studio at 32 Dame Street, Dublin, and by 1786 was ‘as busy as anyone with one head and two hands can possibly be …..I have pictures in hand to the amount of more than 50 guineas…..I am also to receive a silver palette from the Dublin Society in token of the approbation of my pictures’.27 The present painting dates from this early fertile period in his career, according to Strickland it was painted in about 1786.

Encouraged by Gilbert Stuart, the American painter then working in Ireland, in June 1788 Shee moved to England, working initially as a copyist for the engravers Macklin and Boydell. He was subsequently introduced to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who advised him to join the Royal Academy Schools, to which he was admitted in November 1790, just before his 21st birthday, and by the following year, he was exhibiting the first of his very many exhibits at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Shee was admitted A.R.A. in 1798.

Henceforth his career was that of the hugely successful portrait painter, and after the death of Lawrence he was elected by a large majority as President of the Royal Academy in 1830, the first, and only, Irish man to achieve this honour. In the same year he was knighted.

Shee was a member of the Society of Dilettanti, the Royal Society and several overseas cultural institutes. Painting apart, he was a poet, critic, and a playwright. He died at Brighton on 19th August 1850.

The young subject of the portrait, George O'Connor, was the son of the Rev. John O'Connor of Tipperary, 1738-1803, who became vicar of Arboe in 1773, and Rector of Castlenock, County Dublin, in 1794. Like his father before him, George was educated

at Trinity College Dublin, where he matriculated on October 6 1794 at the age of 15, proceeding Bachelor of Arts in the Winter Term of 1799. He did not take his Master of Arts until the summer of 1838. He was received, like his father, into the ministry, and for more than 30 years was prebend of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

O’Connor, in succession to his father, was the rector of the united parishes of Castleknock and Clonsilla in the Dublin Diocese, and of Donaughpatrick in the Diocese of Meath. His father had held these cures for upwards of 40 years. George died 14th November 1842 aged 64, and a memorial and bust were erected to his memory at the church in Castleknock. According to the inscription he was ‘...a fond and affectionate husband, a wise and tender parent, a tried and valued friend, excelled by none’. The memorial to this amiable man survives in the church at Castleknock.

Like Hone before him (see page 46), Shee was a capable and sympathetic child portraitist as is evident in works such as The Annesley Children and The Artist’s Son (Royal Academy). Here there is a great sense of intimacy as the boy, curled into the seat of a handsomely upholstered chair, looks directly at the viewer. Painted while Shee was still working in Dublin, the painting, unsurprisingly, shows the clear residual influence of Stuart, which on his arrival in London was to be replaced by the seductive elegance of Lawrence. Shee’s precocious early talent is clearly apparent and it confirms one contemporary account of his art: ‘His figures have an air of ease and nature, combined with refinement’.28

27

Walter Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, Dublin, 1913, Volume 2, p. 330.

28

William Sandby, quoted in Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, The Painters of Ireland, circa 1660-1920, London, 1978, p. 187.

34

35

LUCIUS GAHAGAN (c.1780 -1866) Portrait Bust à l’antique of King George III as Pater Patriae

Black coloured cast plaster Height 25in (63.5cm) including original integrated socle SIGNED: ‘L. Gahagan fecit’ and further inscribed

‘& publish/ June 1st 1809 / no.12/ Cleveland Street / Fitzroy Square’ on the reverse, and inscribed ‘Pater Patriae’ on the front of the socle.

36

Lucius Gahagan (originally Geoghegan – his father anglicised his name when he moved to London from Dublin) was the son and pupil of Lawrence Gahagan, the distinguished Irish sculptor in marble and bronze. He was born in about 1780, and worked in London, Dublin and Bath, where he lived from 1820 in a house called ‘Lo Studio’. Still preserved in Bath are statues of Commerce and Genius in the frontage of 8-9 Quiet Street, while several small plaster busts are in the collection of the Victoria Art Gallery. The National Portrait Gallery holds a plaster maquette of Richard Beadon, Bishop of Bath and Wells. Much of his work was in collaboration with his father.

Where, as frequently, it is signed ‘L. Gahagan’ it is virtually impossible to identify accurately one’s work from the other. Several of Lawrence’s brothers were also involved in the family sculpture studio in London, notably Sebastian.

Gahagan’s patronage was at an exalted level and he achieved widespread popularity with casts done from terracotta models like the present bust. Few examples of his work in the softer materials survive, and this signed bust in blackened plaster is a welcome addition to his oeuvre.

Gahagan is but one of many Irish sculptors of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who won great renown.

Among his illustrious peers are Christopher Hewetson, Peter Turnerelli and John Hogan.

Their success was noted in the Art Journal for August 1861: ‘Ireland has contributed to the British School of Art more good sculptors – indeed many of our best – than she has painters, in proportion to the relative number of each class of artists; we cannot account for the fact, but know such to be the case, and could prove it, if necessary, by indisputable evidence’. However, because of the quantity

of architectural and funereal work that they undertook, portable works by this illustrious school of Irish sculptors are rarely come across and their achievement is still little appreciated.

George III is depicted here in the classical role of ‘Pater Patriae’, father of his country, an honorific first awarded to Cicero in 63 B.C. and subsequently claimed by Julius Caesar and the Emperor Augustus. Cosimo de Medici was granted the title after his death and it is famously inscribed on his tomb in San Lorenzo. Certainly, during his long reign George consolidated Hanoverian power and brought stability and wealth to the country. In presiding over the loss of the American colonies, George can also be seen as the father of yet another country, though not quite as he intended.

37

JOHN HUTTON (b. 1757) A Set of Six Designs for Coaches

Pen and brown ink and bodycolour, heightened with gold Various sizes approximate average: 18 x 32cm Mostly signed by John Hutton, Great Britain Street [Dublin], numbered and with drawn indications of scale.

Detail of John Rocque’s Map of the City of Dublin, 1756, showing Great Brittain Street and Dominick Street.

William Turner de Lond, fl. circa 1820-1837, George IV at College Green, Dublin (courtesy of the Knight of Glin)

The importance of display in Georgian Ireland manifested itself in a flourishing business in the construction and embellishment of extravagant coaches. Famously in 1789, the Lord Mayor of Dublin commissioned a hugely ostentatious coach from William Whitton of Dominick Street to rival that which had – rather tactlessly – been imported from London by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Clare. The Lord Mayor’s coach cost the fantastic sum of £2,690, which the City agreed to pay as the ‘said coach excels anything of the sort ever made or seen in the kingdom’.29 However, even this was dwarfed by the reported £7,000 that Lord Clare’s coach had cost. Naturally enough, the locally made carriage was adjudged the better of the two, with the Hibernian Magazine noting ‘the superior elegance of Irish workmanship’.30 The Lord Mayor’s coach, together with that of the Lord Lieutenant can be seen in a watercolour by William Turner de Lond, progressing through College Green on the occasion of George IV’s visit to Dublin (private collection) (fig). The image gives a vivid impression of the spectacle that Georgian coaches – the ultimate in conspicuous status symbols – were intended to create. As shall be noted later, John Hutton, the author of this set of six drawings, was also busy that same week in 1821 when the King visited Ireland, as his coach for Daniel O’Connell was about to be unveiled.

The flourishing state of Dublin Coach building in the eighteenth century – and also the fierce civic pride that it engendered – is evident in the anonymous Ancient and Modern State of Ireland, published in 1759, possibly by Henry Brooke. The author concludes his list of the healthy state of Dublin’s manufacturing with the proud assertion: Coaches, Post-Chaises, Chariots, etc., are extremely well and neatly finished in Dublin; and it is certain our Artizans [sic] and Tradesmen in general, execute the Business of their respective Trades and Occupations,

with as much Strength, Fashion and Dispatch…[as] those of most other cities.31 By the 1790s there were at least twentynine coachmakers in Dublin. Despite this, designs for Irish coaches are an enormous rarity. Seemingly, the only comparable group is a set of eight handsome drawings in the collection of Hon. Desmond Guinness for carriages commissioned by the 1st Duke of Leinster of Carton – the stables of which are recorded in this catalogue. The designer of these remains anonymous and when he published them in Country Life some years ago, Guinness expressed the hope that other designs for Irish carriages would shed light on the subject.32 It is very pleasing then to be able to publish for the first time these elegant designs by John Hutton, the leading Irish coachmaker of his day.

Only one other drawing by Hutton is known, a further design for a coach in the collection in the Knight of Glin. Like the Leinster drawings which remained in the family’s estate office in Dominick Street until the 1950s, these are clearly presentation drawings to be shown to clients. This is evident not just in the high level of finish but also by the inclusion of alternative designs on superimposed flaps of paper on each sheet.

Different options, with different prices, could be offered to clients so that each carriage was to a large degree bespoke.

The great appeal of the drawings is not only the constantly inventive reworking of the basic forms of coach design, but particularly the vibrancy of the colour, which has survived to an unusually fresh degree. In places, the watercolour is heightened with gold, emphasising the sheer opulence of the drawings as works of art in their own right, but also giving an indication of the splendour of the completed coaches themselves.

John Hutton was born in 1757, the third son of Robert Hutton, a currier and representative for the Guild of Tanners on the Common Council. In 1779, Hutton began his

coach-building business in Great Britain Street (now Parnell Street) immediately adjacent to Dominick Street where Whitton had constructed the Lord Mayor’s coach (see John Rocque’s Map of the City of Dublin). Several of Hutton’s drawings are specifically inscribed ‘Great Brittain Street’, and this area was clearly the heart of Dublin’s coach building industry – in addition to Whitton, three other coach builders are recorded in Dominick Street in the 1790s.

Soon after Hutton opened the business, he had a stroke of luck. The establishment of the Irish Post Office in 1784 stimulated the need for a mail coach service, and the Dublin Chronicle of 19 July 1788 announced that the Lord Lieutenant had ‘ordered two mail coaches to be built by Hutton as models, which are intended as presents to the contractors. All their other carriages are to be built to exactly correspond and be agreeable to that model, which is the same as the patent mail coaches

now used on all the roads in England.’ Some months later the same newspaper recorded that ‘the new mail coach, made under the direction of Mr. Hutton, coachmaker, was exhibited before his Excellency, the Lord Lieutenant, and afterwards through the city with all its apparatus drawn by four elegant grey horses – the driver and quad in royal livery’.

In the first decade of the nineteenthcentury, Hutton was joined by two of his sons, Robert and Thomas, who maintained the elevated profile of the family business.

Hutton’s provided the coach in which Daniel O’Connell travelled to meet George IV at Dun Laoghaire in 1821 – no doubt a great marketing coup – and, in the same year, built a coach for the Marquis of Wellesley on his being appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. By 1837 Hutton’s had received a Royal Warrant, and in 1851 exhibited at the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park. Hutton’s were also

commissioned to produce an Irish State coach for the Dublin International Exhibition, which was displayed to great acclaim in 1853.

It was noticed by Queen Victoria and she immediately bought it for £858. After the death of Prince Albert, Victoria refused to travel in the Gold Stage Coach and instead favoured the Irish State Coach. The original was destroyed in a fire in 1911 and Hutton’s design was replicated by the Barker coachbuilding company.

It is in this new version of the Irish State Coach that the present Queen usually travels in on route to the State Opening of Parliament. It is preserved in the Royal Mews of Buckingham Palace – a far cry from Dublin’s Parnell Street where Hutton worked and where he prepared these masterly designs for Irish coaches. The firm continued in the twentieth century, and, always at the forefront of design and innovation, Hutton’s were appointed the sole Irish agent for Daimler Cars in the 1920s.33

29

Quoted Philip McEvansoneya, ‘A Colourful Spectacle Restored; The State Coach of the Lord Mayor of Dublin’, in Irish Arts Review Yearbook, Vol. 17, 2001, p. 84.

30

Quoted Constantia Maxwell, Dublin Under the Georges, 1714-1830, London, 1936, p. 262.

31

Quoted ibid., p. 265.

32

Desmond Guinness, ‘Mobile Thrones,’ Country Life, January 15, 2004, p. 53.

33

See Jim Cooke, Ireland’s Premier Coachbuilder, John Hutton and Sons, Summerhill, Dublin 1779-1925, Dublin, no date, c. 1993.

38

39

JOHN HUTTON A Set of Six Designs for Coaches

40

41

ROBERT FAGAN (1761-1816) Three-quarter-length portrait of Lady Emma Hamilton in her ‘Attitude’ as a Neapolitan Peasant

Signed, inscribed ‘Roma’ and dated 1793 Oil on canvas Unframed: 17d x 14in (44.5 x 35.5cm) Framed: 23d x 20in (59 x 51cm)

Robert Fagan, 1761-1816, Portrait of a Lady as Hibernia, (Sotheby’s, 15 November 1989)

The known oeuvre of the Irish neo-classical painter Robert Fagan is tiny, making the publication of this unrecorded picture, signed and dated 1793, a significant discovery.

Equally, the fame of the sitter, Lady Emma Hamilton, makes it a key work of Irish Grand Tour art. At this date Emma had been married to Sir William Hamilton, ambassador to the court of Naples, for two years. Although her period of fame, indeed notoriety, as the mistress of Nelson was in the future, she was already established as one of the most sought after, if least conventional, ‘sights’ of the Grand Tour. That the flamboyant artist should have wanted to paint the celebrated beauty is of course not surprising. Both led unconventional lives and Emma had inspired a succession of artists, most notably George Romney.

Both were rather seen as outsiders in the aristocratic world they inhabited. Fagan, the son of a baker, was mocked for his lack of breeding; Emma, the daughter of a blacksmith was ridiculed by Lady Webster (herself painted

by Fagan) for her lapses in etiquette.34 Fagan’s passionate interest in classical statuary which he excavated, traded and collected would have been a further incentive for seeking out Emma who was celebrated as the living embodiment of antique sculpture.

This had been expressed by Goethe a few years earlier: ‘After many years of devotion to the arts and the study of nature [Sir William has] found the acme of these delights in the person of an English girl of 20 with a beautiful face and a perfect figure. He has had a Greek costume made for her which becomes her extremely. Dressed in this she lets down her hair, and with a few shawls, gives so much

variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc., that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes.’35 Fagan’s art was inspired by the classical sculpture he excavated (much of it preserved in the Museum in Palermo). Here for once he had the opportunity to paint the classical ideal made flesh.

The size of Fagan’s oeuvre is not surprising. His adventurous, not to say tempestuous, life can have left little time to paint and only some twenty pictures are known. Nevertheless he has been hailed by Trevelyan as an outstanding artist in the neoclassic tradition with Waterhouse going even further to claim him as the ‘only British portrait painter who deliberately adopted a neo-classic style’.36 However, in addition to stylistic modernity and his embrace of international neo-classicism, Fagan was one of the most interesting and innovative of all Irish artists. A catholic and fierce republican, he naturally alienated many British Grand Tourists, even refusing to show his pictures to Lady Knight on the grounds that she and her family were ‘enemies of the revolution’. Fagan’s Portrait of a Lady as Hibernia, described as his ‘patriotic masterpiece’ is replete with Irish symbolism and can be interpreted as a lament for his native country’s loss of independence after the Act of Union.37 The quality of his work, his glamorous life and tragic death certainly justify Professor Crookshank and the Knight of Glin’s assessment of Fagan as ‘one of the most dramatic characters associated with Irish painting.’38 Fagan spent almost his entire career in Italy and came into the Hamiltons’ ambit from an early date. He shared with Sir William an interest in classical art and at a

34

A. Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Irish Portraits 1660-1860, Exhibition Catalogue, (London 1969) 65; J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701-1800, compiled from the Brindsley Ford Archive, New Haven and London, 1997, p. 456.

35

Quoted Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, p. 456.

36

R. Trevelyan, ‘Robert Fagan, and Irish Bohemian in Italy’, Apollo, lxcvi, October, 1972, p. 300; E. Waterhouse, Dictionary of British 18th Century Painters in Oil and Crayons, Woodbridge, 1981, p.122.

42

37

A. Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Ireland’s Painters, 1600-1940, New Haven and London, 2002, p. 118.

38

Ibid.

43

ROBERT FAGAN Three-quarter-length portrait of Lady Emma Hamilton in her ‘Attitude’ as a Neapolitan Peasant

later date was himself appointed a British diplomat, a task for which he was spectacularly unsuited. Fagan would have come directly into contact with William Hamilton through his archaeological activities.

From 1793, the exact date of the present portrait, he was excavating at Campo Iemini in the company of Prince Augustus Frederick, later Duke of Sussex. The prince, sixth son of George III, had been put under the care of Hamilton, who reported to Queen Charlotte on his progress and his inappropriate liaisons.

Fagan painted Emma twice. A further portrait of her as a bacchante was on the art market recently and is now in the Smurfit Collection.39 Here he shows her in a calmer pose. Following Fagan’s usual pattern he gives the place as well as the date of the execution of the picture. It is signed ‘Roma 1793’. It is accordingly an early work following the portraits of Lady Clifford (1791) and Sir Andrew Corbet and his wife (1792) (both private collections). Fagan was based in Rome from 1793 to 1797, however, up to sometime in 1793, Fagan had resided in Naples where no doubt he sketched Lady Hamilton performing one of her attitudes, completing the work later in the year and signing it in Rome.

Most of Emma’s attitudes were taken from classical antiquity. One contemporary describes how ‘with the assistance of one or two Etruscan vases and an urn’ she would become ‘a Sibyl, then a Fury, A Niobe, a Sophonisba, a Bacchante drinking wine’.40 This last posture was how she was portrayed in another (undated) picture by Fagan in which he includes a tripod and Greek vase, no doubt from Sir William’s own collection, as attributes to define Emma as a devotee of the God of

Wine. Given Emma’s own later alcoholism, this iconography was ironically prescient.

In the newly discovered work considered here, Emma, with a knowing smile on her face, takes on a more humble, if equally seductive part. The same source noted how Emma would drop her classical guise to take on the character of a Neapolitan peasant woman dancing a tarantella with castanets. Emma is shown here in the brightly coloured costumes of the south of Italy about to embark on her dance. Fagan’s romanticisation of the life of the Neapolitan peasantry would have attuned well with the Neapolitan court. Ferdinand and Maria Carolina at Naples liked to withdraw from the formality of court life and play at a bucolic existence as humble peasants, perhaps inspired by the example of Marie Antoinette’s hameau at Versailles (the French queen was of course Maria Carolina’s sister). The royal family were even painted by Philip Hackert in peasant costumes ‘indulging in the fantasy that they are helping to harvest the crops’ (Museo de San Martino, Naples).41 For Sir William Hamilton and indeed for Fagan, there would not have been a marked distinction between Emma’s classical and more contemporary attitudes. It was something of a commonplace to see in the life and customs of the Neapolitan peasantry survivals from the classical past. ‘The local customs of the inhabitants were unique and certainly picturesque…Local games such as mora, dances such as the tarantella, and religious customs all seemed to have reflections in objects and paintings discovered in the excavations, and thus appeared to have ancient roots.’42 These were depicted by local and visiting artists such as David Allan and

Pietro Fabris. A direct comparison may be made with Allan’s 1776 picture A Procidian Girl (Duke of Hamilton). However, in contrast to Allan’s attempt at empirical observation and the woman’s rather generic features, in Fagan’s picture the element of acting, or role play, is clear. The theatrical was of course part of Fagan’s own artistic persona, so evidently exemplified in his famous self-portrait with his second wife (Hunt Museum, Limerick).

Here, he captures Emma’s flirtatiousness, but also her vulnerability. It is a striking image and an important document of the lives of both artist and sitter.

39

Sold Sotheby’s The Irish Sale,18 May 2000 lot 68; see T. Murphy, Smurfit Art Collection 2001, Dublin, 2001, p. 11.

40

Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, p. 458.

41

Lady Hamilton in relation to the art of her Time, Exhibition Catalogue, Kenwood House, London, 1972, p. 34.

42

Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, Sir William Hamilton and His Collection, Exhibition Catalogue, British Museum, London, 1996, p. 242.

44

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NATHANIEL HONE RA (1718 -1784) Portrait of a Young Boy

Oil on canvas Unframed: 30 x 25in (76.2 x 63.5cm) Framed: 36e x 32in (93.4 x 81.3cm)

This is a particularly engaging example of child portraiture, the genre in which Hone excelled.

Born in Dublin in 1718, little is known of his training, though his early pastels suggest that he may have studied with Robert West, when he was still running a private academy, prior to it being taken over by the Dublin Society. Hone moved to England at an early age and worked primarily as a painter of miniatures. In 1742 he married an heiress, Mary Earl, at York Minister.

Pasquin, clearly a biased witness, with something of a vendetta against the artist, gives a hostile account of Hone’s evident affinity with children, telling how he would lodge at the best in a town and having asked to dine with the family, would lavish praise on their children before offering to paint them: ‘the portmanteau was unpacked, the operations began; while the fond and partial parents hung in rapture over his shoulder….Thus he made his establishment secure, and gave general satisfaction, by offending truth and outraging taste; making the children as angels, the mother as a Venus, and the husband a well-fed Job, in a brown periwig’.43 Hone was appointed one of the directors of the Society of Incorporated Artists in 1766 but resigned two years later to be become a founding member of the Royal Academy. He exhibited his charming The Piping Boy – a

portrait of his son Camillus – (National Gallery of Ireland) in the Academy’s first exhibition and sent a total of sixty-nine works to their annual shows. However, as is well known, Hone, sometimes a difficult man, fell out with his fellow academicians and had a long-standing feud with Sir Joshua Reynolds – proposing Gainsborough for the Presidency in 1774.

Things culminated the following year in the controversy surrounding The Conjuror (National Gallery of Ireland) in which Hone caricatures Reynolds, satirising his supposed plagiarism by including prints of the old masters which, he suggests, the Academy’s President had reused in his work. Particular offence was taken to a female figure interpreted as representing Angelica Kauffmann, with whom Reynolds was rumoured to have had an affair. Although this was painted out, the work was rejected for hanging by the Academy and Hone exhibited it privately, together with almost a hundred other of his works, in one of the very first oneman shows, in St Martin’s Lane. The only work that Hone did exhibit at the Academy that year was the famous Spartan Boy (private collection), perhaps his finest child portrait, which Walpole admired at the exhibition for its colouring and expression.

As noted above, Hone is famously at his best at portraying children. Waterhouse in his Dictionary notes how the artist was inspired to paint his most original and sensitive works by his Camillus while le Harivel writes: ‘his affinity for children often captures the transience of childhood, [and is] surpassed only

by Gainsborough’.44 Here, the young boy sits on a chair, one arm resting on its top as if he has been posed slightly against his will. This apparent reticence is, however, belied by his confident and expressive engagement directly with the painter whom he faces, and so with

the viewer. It is a work of great charm, freshness and immediacy. Hone perfectly captures a characteristic mixture of shyness and mischief in the young boy’s face and, in this, it can be directly compared with a further work by the artist showing a child of a similar age, in rather similar costume (private collection, formerly with Agnews). Both paintings share the ‘slightly excessive brightness of expression (effected by the highlights in the eyes)’ which characterises Hone’s work.45 Again the costume and handling of paint is close to The Sketching Boy (National Gallery of Ireland) (fig), a portrait of another son Horace, who was himself to become an eminent miniaturist. The intimacy of the present work would suggest that it is of a family member, but this must await further confirmation.

Nathaniel Hone, 1718-1784, The Sketching Boy (National Gallery of Ireland)

43

Adrian Le Harivel, Nathaniel Hone, Dublin, 1992, p.10.

44

Ellis Waterhouse, Dictionary of British Eighteenth-Century Painters, Woodbridge, 1981, p. 180; Le Harivel, op. cit, p. 30.

45

Waterhouse, op. cit.

46

47

Enniscorthy Bridge, Engraving after Dr. Wynne, for Francis Grose's Antiquities of Ireland, (National Library of Ireland)

PAUL SANDBY RA (c. 1730-1809) A View of Enniscorthy, County Wexford, with Figures Unloading a Boat

Pencil, watercolour and gouache Unframed: 16 x 20ein (40.6 x 52.7cm) Framed: 18e x 23ein (47.6 x 60.3cm) Inscribed on the original canvas lining ‘Enniscorthy, in the county of Wexford, Ireland’ PROVENANCE: an early nineteenth-century label of Tooth’s Depository of the Arts, Lincoln, is attached to the reverse.

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Paul Sandby was born in Nottingham, the son of a ‘frame-work knitter’ (probably a small-scale manufacturer rather than a labourer), and came to London with his younger brother, the architect Thomas Sandby, in 1747. He obtained a post in the ‘Drawing Room’ of the Department of Ordnance, and subsequently became a topographic surveyor for the Ordnance Survey in the aftermath of the ‘45’, and was in Scotland from 1747 to 1752, where, in Edinburgh, he learned etching.

On his return to London in the spring of 1752,

he obtained a post at Windsor, where he became a pioneer in the tradition of the English natural landscape. Sandby was a popular and well-patronised watercolourist and became drawing-master to a number of wealthy amateurs. He was the first artist to use the acquatint process in England, and regularly undertook drawing expeditions to the picturesque parts of the kingdom, including Wales and the North of England.

In 1768 Sandby was appointed chief drawing master of the Royal Military College

at Woolwich, the same year as his election as a Royal Academician. In the 1770s Sandby was inspired by the gouaches of Marco Ricci in George III’s collection, and more of his work was undertaken in that medium, in a tonality notably livelier than in his early work.

A small number of watercolours and gouaches of the east coast of Ireland survive, and it seems likely that he made a visit in, or about, 1778, as another painting of Carrick Ferry (also in County Wexford) was engraved for The Virtuosi’s Cabinet in 1780. However, no details of his visit have survived and it has been suggested that Sandby’s Irish subjects were drawn from sketches made on the spot by his friend Lord Portarlington.46 During this period Sandby enjoyed the patronage of the opulent Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn of Wynnstay (the patron of George Mullins and Thomas Roberts), Sir Joseph Banks and Charles Greville, son of the Earl of Warwick.

In 1757, Sandby had married Anne Stogden; their son Paul eventually succeeded his father as drawing-master at Woolwich.

Sandby’s later years were difficult as public taste had moved on from the fresh and uncomplicated natural style which he espoused, and he was ultimately constrained to petition the Royal Academy for financial support to supplement his modest pension.

He died on November 8th, 1809, his obituary describing him as the ‘father of modern landscape-painting in watercolours’ (London

Detail of inscription on lining

Review and Literary Journal, Nov. 8, 1809). The largest collections of Sandby’s work are in the Royal Collection at Windsor and in the Castle Museum, Nottingham.

Here, Sandby portrays Enniscorthy, a small but thriving town in the north of County Wexford. It grew up around the castle which was crenellated by the Prendergast family in 1205 and was the home of the poet Edmund Spencer in the sixteenth century. A Franciscan Friary was established on the riverbank to the south of the castle in 1459. The small town was purchased en bloc by Sir Henry Wallop in 1585, and it remained in the family, subsequently Earls of Portsmouth, for many years. Cromwell passed through the town on his way to Wexford in 1649; within a few years, in 1654, a pottery had been established at Carley’s bridge.

The present bridge, seen in Sandby’s gouache, was constructed by the Oriel brothers in 1775, thus giving a terminus ante quem for the dating of the picture. The same view is shown in an engraving by Sparrow after a drawing for Francis Grose's Antiquities of Ireland by Rev. Dr. Wynne (fig); while the castle alone is the subject of a drawing attributed to Barralet which was also engraved for Grose's Antiquities (National Library of Ireland). This latter attribution, as Peter Harbison has noted, is substantiated by the letterpress to the plate stating that ‘this view was taken from an original drawing

by Barralet, in the collection of the Right Honourable William Conyngham’.47 Slightly later, Samuel Lewis gives a good account of the scene here depicted.

The town is built on the acclivities of the hills on both sides of the Slaney, and in 1831 contained 1,047 houses: the streets are in general narrow and in some parts inconveniently steep for carriages. The principal portion is on the south-west side of the river, which is connected by a substantial stone bridge of six arches with the other portion, which lies at the base of Vinegar Hill, and comprises the suburbs of Templeshannon and Drumgoold. The bridge is now being widened and its roadway lowered, partly at the expense of Lord Portsmouth's trustees and partly by a Grand Jury presentment; and a plentiful supply of spring-water, from Sheill's well at Templeshannon, will be conveyed, by pipes inserted in the new work of the bridge, into several parts of the town, which is at present but badly supplied, and only partially paved.

A small woollen manufacture is carried on near the town.48 In Sandby’s work the lively scene of staffage unloading barrels from the boat is witness to the busy trade of the town which a few years after Sandby peaceful image was to be the scene of intense fighting in the 1798 Rebellion.

46

Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, The Watercolours of Ireland, Work on Paper in Pencil, Pastel and Paint, c. 1600-1914, London 1994, pp. 45-46.

47

Information from the National Library of Ireland.

48

Samuel Lewis, Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, London, 1837, vol. 1, pp. 602-03

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JAMES MALTON (c.1760-1803) The Portico of Parliament House, Dublin, Looking towards Trinity College

Pen and ink and watercolour on paper Unframed: 18 x 24in (45.7 x 61cm) Inscribed on a fragment of the old backing board: Portico of the Bank of Ireland, / drawn and coloured by / James Malton PROVENANCE: Believed to be from the collection of John Mulhall of Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin; Christie’s 15 November, 1983 (156)

Left: The Portico of Parliament House, Dublin (now the Bank of Ireland) looking towards Trinity College (photograph, David Davison)

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Malton’s views of Dublin have defined our image of the Georgian city. Although widely popularised as prints – perhaps the most popular of all eighteenth-century Irish engravings – Malton’s original watercolours are extremely rare and show him to have been a draughtsman of outstanding quality. This and the following item are among these rare survivals still in private hands and act, as McParland notes, as ‘informative and beautiful witnesses to the appearance of Dublin at the end of the eighteenth century’.49 James Malton was the son of Thomas Malton (1726-1801), architectural draftsman, cabinet maker and lecturer on perspective.

James’s brother Thomas (1748-1804) was also an accomplished architectural draftsman.

Thomas the Elder’s lectures on perspective were attended by the young Turner and influenced Turner’s own method of teaching when he was appointed Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy in 1811.

However, he encountered business difficulties following a fire that destroyed stocks of his two books on geometry and perspective, and his move to Dublin in the mid-1780s may have been prompted by financial necessity.

James, who seems to have accompanied his father to Ireland, was initially employed in the office of the architect James Gandon, but after three years, Gandon sacked him for betraying business confidences and other ‘irregularities’.

For most of the 1790s, James appears to have

been based in London, but he still made regular visits to Dublin.

Malton seems to have particularly admired the portico of the Parliament House, in College Green, (now the Bank of Ireland) built earlier in the century to the designs of Edward Lovett Pearce. He even envisaged it as a romantic ruin of the future, producing a pair of views entitled Parliament House in its Present State and An Imaginary View of Parliament House in Decay (Bank of Ireland Collection).

These have been interpreted allegorically by Crookshank and Glin, as summing up ‘the contemporary view of Ireland’s political future after the Act of Union’ which would make the Parliament House redundant.50 The present work has a similar viewpoint to the Parliament House in its Present State, but widened out to the right to include the façade of Trinity College. Malton’s pessimistic view into the future which saw the building in ruins, happily did not transpire and the view is almost identical today (fig).

Malton’s architectural training would, of course, have given him insight into the originality of Pearce’s great masterpiece. He prepared his highly detailed watercolours from sketches produced on the spot in 1791 and on several occasions revisited the same handful of set-piece views that had originally inspired him. The following year, he exhibited a view of the Parliament House Portico at the Royal Academy (no. 552), apparently as a

49

Edward McParland, ‘Malton’s Views of Dublin: Too Good to be True?’ in Raymond Gillespie and Brian P. Kennedy (eds), Ireland, Art into History, Dublin, 1994, p. 15.

50

Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, The Watercolours of Ireland, Works on Paper in Pencil, Pastel and Paint, c. 1600-1914, London, 1994, p. 98.

51

JAMES MALTON The Portico of Parliament House, Dublin, Looking towards Trinity College

companion to a picture entitled The New Portico to the House of Lords, Dublin (no. 569).

The former may be our drawing, however, the present location of the House of Lords watercolour is unknown.

Another view of the Parliament House portico, of a similar size and composition, but with additional figures, is in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.44 In contrast to this work, the present watercolour is almost entirely devoid of figures, with the emphasis firmly focused on the brilliantly depicted sunlit architecture. Only a carriage turning down Dame Street breaks the mood of intense stillness. This, together with the slightly exaggerated sense of perspective, emphasised by the large columns in the foreground, their tops hidden from view, imparts an almost surrealist feel to the scene, making for a curiously modern image – almost like a de Chirico. It is one of the most theatrical of all Malton’s watercolours, and perhaps the most boldly-composed, a thoughtful homage to Pearce and the glories of eighteenth-century Irish architecture.

44

Adrian Le Harivel, National Gallery of Ireland, Illustrated Summary Catalogue of Drawings, Watercolours and Miniatures, Dublin, 1983, p. 497.

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JAMES MALTON (c. 1760-1803) View of the Provost’s House and Trinity College, Grafton Street, Dublin, 1796

Signed and dated James Malton del 1796 Pen and ink and watercolour over traces of pencil Unframed: 21a x 30ain (54.6 x 77.5cm) (including a narrow strip of paper added to the left edge by the artist) Inscribed by the artist on a fragment of the old backing paper: View of the Provost’s House and Trinity College, Grafton Street Dublin. / Taken, Drawn, & Finished Feby. 1796. / by James Malton

In absolute contrast to the previous work, a profound mediation on architectural solemnity, here Dublin bursts into life.

Although the architecture of Trinity College is the notional subject, the great appeal of the work is its colourful rendering of a single moment of the city’s existence. This is one of Malton’s finest watercolours to remain in private hands and one of the most beautiful views of the very heart of Dublin to have been executed in the course of the eighteenth century.

The Provost’s House, built for Provost Andrew in the 1760s, is still the residence of the head of Trinity College. As is clearly apparent in Malton’s image, the house is separated from Grafton Street by a walled forecourt. The interior is remarkable for its wealth of rococo plasterwork. Christine Casey,

who has admirably researched its history, describes it as a ‘grand and eccentric stonefronted townhouse that survives in pristine condition’. She notes that the ‘enclosed forecourt and stone façade were rare privileges in mid-19th Century Dublin and the Provost’s House has the air of a nobleman’s palace rather than the residence of a senior academic’.51 It was clearly intended as a deliberate symbol of the College’s, and indeed the city’s, thriving self-confidence in the midcentury. Just a few decades after it was completed, when Malton came to depict it, the Provost’s House was already one of the great sights of the city.

Between 1769 and 1784 Thomas Malton the Younger, James’s brother, had made a series of watercolours of the Georgian architecture of Bath which he

James Malton, circa 1760-1803, View of the Provost’s House and Trinity College, Grafton Street, Dublin, aquatint and etching; Taken from Malton’s A Picturesque and descriptive View of the City of Dublin, described in a series of the most interesting scenes taken in the year 1791 (published 1794)

51

Christine Casey, Dublin, The City Within the Grand the Royal Canals and the Circular Road with the Phoenix Park, New Haven and London, 2005, p. 392.

52

Walter Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, Dublin, 1913, Volume 2, p. 96.

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then successfully translated into a set of aquatints. Twenty-five of James Malton’s Dublin views were similarly reproduced as a set of aquatints, entitled A Picturesque and Descriptive View of the City of Dublin and published between 1792 and 1799. The preface sets out Malton’s ambitious aim: The entire of the views were taken in 1791 by the author, who, being experienced in the drawing of architecture and perspective, has delineated every object with the utmost accuracy; the dimensions too, of the structures described were taken by him from originals, and may be depended upon for their correctness. Though all the views were taken in the year 1791, yet as the work was in hand till the year 1797, such alterations as occurred in each subject between the taking and the publishing of any view of it have been attended to; to the end that it might be as perfect a semblance as possible of the original at the time of the completion of the work.

Although James Malton did include a view of the Provost’s House in this series (appropriately dedicated to Provost John Hely Hutchinson) (fig), our watercolour is not the basis for the aquatint. Instead is one of a number of larger pictures drawn in the 1790s, each 21 or 21a by 30a inches in size. It is signed by Malton and dated 1796, two years after the engraving had appeared, but while he was still engaged in completing the series.

The figures of these large watercolours (as Strickland notes) ‘vary considerably from those in the published views’.52 Two others, The Royal Exchange and Parliament House, College Green are now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California and two, St Catherine’s, St Thomas’s Street and Trinity College, College Green are in the National Gallery of Ireland. The Huntington Royal Exchange was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1795 (no. 643) and the Parliament House in 1797 (no. 1144). The date of our picture (February 1796) suggests it may have been intended for exhibition at the Royal

JAMES MALTON View of the Provost’s House and Trinity College, Grafton Street, Dublin, 1796

Academy in the spring of 1796, but for some reason was not submitted.

All of these extra-large Dublin watercolours have more numerous figures than the smaller engraved versions. They were created as carefully crafted works of art in their own right, and Malton has lavished immense pains on finding the right balance between architecture and staffage. The palette is subtle with a refined mix of related colours and an overall very fresh tonality. Our picture is packed with a lively mix of figures, horses, carts and carriages. It even features a legible theatre bill advertising a performance of As You Like it for the benefit of Mr Ryder, and a performance of Hob in the Well. The Mr Ryder mentioned must be Thomas Ryder, a wellknown Dublin actor-manager, who died in 1791 the year that Malton made his first sketches for his proposed engravings.

Malton clearly locates the view with street signs at opposite sides of the picture, indicating the corner of Suffolk Street and Grafton Street. In a rather idealised picture of the interaction of Dublin Social classes, well-dressed figures, to the right and left, disport themselves elegantly, while appropriately picturesque urchins and beggars deferentially solicit alms. As the Anthologia Hibernica noted ‘Dublin never before appeared so respectable’,53 and Malton eschews the grinding poverty that Hugh Douglas Hamilton had exposed in his Cries of Dublin of 1760.

Instead, he offers an ideal view in which the city’s citizenry are as refined and well mannered as its magnificent architecture.

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56

Ibid.

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Mallett Addresses Directors

The Village at Lyons

Gaspare Gabrielli, 1770-1828, View of Lyons Demesne, (private collection)

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The Village at Lyons Demesne in County Kildare is a rare and amazing treasure of architectural features, master craftsmanship and decorative detailing. Lovingly restored and encompassing the Georgian Canal Station, The Village at Lyons is one of Irelands most exciting and spectacular projects ever which opened in September 2006.

Enjoy the Georgian village life and surround yourself in luxury in one of our individually appointed houses. Sample the culinary delights of our restaurants and purchase freshly baked breads form our bakery. Take a stroll along the canal and relax with a cocktail in The Lyons Den. Soak up the sunshine in the courtyard or toast yourself by the open fire.

We invite you to take pleasure in all that The Village at Lyons has to offer.

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The Village The ancient seventh century church and settlement of Cluain Eaghlis grew up close to this spot beneath Lyons Hill, from where 10 Kings of Leinster had ruled during the first millennium. The Village at Lyons lies along the scenic towpath of the Grand Canal at Aylmers Bridge and Lyons Demesne the former home of the Aylmers, an old Kildare dynasty, and later the Lawless family who held the title of Lord Cloncurry.

The village derives its name from an ancient town and castle, which were both destroyed in the war of 1641.

Built on the original site of this ancient fortification, The village at Lyons fully sprang to life with the arrival of the Grand Canal, which was built circa 1756 to 1803. The canal was a vital transport link in Ireland as it was much cheaper and much more reliable than road transport at the time.

03 meant that a thriving community grew up along the canal bank. By 1850 this included a hotel, a forge, several shops, workshops and a police barracks. Joseph P. Shackleton took over the flourmill, a relation of the Antarctic explorer.

In 1865 when canal traffic peaked, 90 barges a day passed through here bringing flour, local merchandise and stone from the Ardclough quarries to Dublin City.

The mill accidentally burned in 1903, the canal was closed to traffic in 1960, Lyons House was sold in 1963, and life in the village came to a halt as community activity focused instead on nearby Ardclough.

Village life was reborn after 1996 with the restoration of the first of the village homesteads. We invite you to share in our enjoyment of this historic place.

The construction of Lyons House nearby in 1786 and its lavish reconstruction by Valentine Lawless in 1800-

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Back cover: Ambrose Shardlow, Watercolour map of Ireland (Mallett)