Wyatt Thing

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A detail of the plaster frieze running around the walls of the staircase hall at Ardbraccan, County Meath. We know that in 1773 James Wyatt produced drawings for the centre block of the house. These were commissioned by Henry Maxwell, Bishop of Meath whose brother Barry Maxwell, Earl of Farnham would likewise employ Wyatt to design a new house for him in County Cavan a few years later. In the event, the architect’s plans for Ardbraccan were modified to incorporate elements from schemes by both Thomas Cooley and Daniel Beaufort, the latter a gifted amateur who was also Rector of nearby Navan. However, the staircase hall’s plasterwork is distinctly Wyatt’esque and so it is surely not too fanciful to imagine that at least this part of his proposal was executed without intervention from other hands.

6 comments on “Wyatt Thing

  1. Marie-France Mansfield Savinel says:

    Best wishes to you Mr O’Byrne for the new year and thank you for your most interesting posts !
    As a French reader with Irish origins in County Waterford, I am fond of your work which keeps me
    connected to Ireland through my interests , arts, heritage and history . Thank you again !

  2. Might you give us some sense of scale of this frieze? An approximations of the dimension bead to bead that defines the limit of that hugely elegant wave scroll. Truly tremendous.

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