Farewell to a Polymath

Last November, the Financial Times published an extensive feature on Alec Cobbe, chronicling some, although by no means all, of his many achievements. Alec, who after a few months ill health died last week, could rightly be described as a polymath, the FT summarising his various skills as an art restorer, historian, author, re-hanger, interior designer and painter who also happened to be a fine pianist. But this is to understate his profusion of talents. To take the last on that list, Alec not only played the piano, he also collected historic keyboard instruments, more than 50 of them which are on display at Hatchlands Park, a National Trust property in Surrey leased by Alec and his wife Isabel since 1984. On display there are two grand pianos which had once belonged to Chopin, as well as Haydn’s grand piano, Liszt’s Italian upright piano, Bizet’s composing table-piano, Mahler’s Viennese piano, Johann Christian Bach’s piano, on which Mozart may also have played, and instruments which formerly belonged to George IV and Marie Antoinette: anyone who visited the recently-ended exhibition devoted to the French queen at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum would have seen her piano there. But as mentioned above, this was just one of Alec’s many skills, of which he had an abundance. He was a highly talented painter (particularly of country house interiors), and separately an illustrator whose work was much in demand for the design of invitations to all sorts of smart events. In addition, he was a restorer who over the course of his life identified more than one lost old master picture, and an interior designer much in demand for his ability to hang picture collections, most recently those at Castle Howard; other houses in which he worked included Harewood, Hatfield, Hillsborough Castle, Knole and Petworth. Extraordinarily well-read and well-informed, he brought a keen and critical eye to every enterprise. But although a well-known and widely admired figure in Britain, Alec’s achievements were perhaps less appreciated in his native Ireland.

Alec Cobbe was born in Dublin in 1945 and spent much of his childhood at Newbridge, the house some short distance north of the city where his widowed mother lived with her bachelor brother-in-law. Newbridge had been commissioned by the family’s forebear, Charles Cobbe, Archbishop of Dublin, in the late 1740s and designed by James Gibbs, seemingly the architect’s only work in Ireland (for more on Newbridge, see The Glory of the House « The Irish Aesthete). Without question, Alec’s eye received its earliest training at Newbridge, a house to which he remained thereafter devoted despite being based on the other side of the Irish Sea for the greater part of his professional life. After school, initially he studied medicine at Oxford (and won a prize for anatomical drawing) but then moved into the field of art restoration, training at the Tate Gallery before he established a conservation studio at Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, and then worked at the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge. Eventually he opened his own studio in 1981. As he explained in the FT article, the move into interior decoration and specifically picture hanging was a natural evolution: having taken care of a painting’s restoration, he would often see it hung unsympathetically. As he explained, ‘I’d think, “Why the hell did I spend all that time on the picture for it to be killed by the hanging of the thing”?’ Alec was always a man of strong opinions and with few qualms about expressing them. When the members of the public visit Newbridge today, they are seeing a house that represents his vision of its history and evolution. Yet this almost didn’t happen. When Alec’s uncle Thomas died in 1985, the house and estate were acquired by the local authority and it looked as though the family’s link with the property would be irreparably broken. Instead, just as the building’s contents were about to be removed, an agreement was made whereby they would remain on the premises and, in return, the Cobbes would be able to live in Newbridge from time to time. Although such arrangements are common in England, this is highly unusual in Ireland but proved to be an enormous blessing not least because Alec, passionate about the place, did much to improve it by driving various restoration projects and adding to the existing furnishings and works of art. He also loved to entertain in the house, and those of us fortunate to have been invited will have fond memories of convivial meals, either eaten in the main dining room or upstairs in the family flat, followed by a sound night’s sleep in one of the guest bedrooms.

The pictures shown here reflect two rooms in Newbridge that particularly engaged Alec’s attention. The first is a cabinet of curiosities. Incorporating items collected by Archbishop Cobbe, this was essentially the creation of his son Thomas and daughter-in-law Lady Betty Cobbe who lived there from the time of their marriage in 1755 to their respective deaths in the early 19th century. Originally referred to as ‘ye Ark’, the cabinet takes up an entire room in the house, its walls lined with hand-painted sheets depicting oriental scenes and held in place by faux bamboo découpage trellising. A suite of specially made cases and display cabinets were filled with a typically diverse range of items, shells, exotica, curios, much of it from other countries. In 1758, for example, the Cobbes bought some coral, as well as a nest of vipers and a ‘Solar Microscope.’ Eventually, the collection came to include a stuffed crocodile, an ostrich egg mounted in a bog oak stand, a set of ivory chess pieces from China and a depiction of the coronation of George III (1761) carved in bone and placed inside a glass bottle. Over time, the room in Newbridge began to suffer neglect: even by 1858 it was being described as ‘the poor old museum.’ In the 1960s the paper on the walls was taken down and sold, the cases and cabinets moved first to the basement and then an attic lumber room, and the space converted into a sitting room. While many of the surviving contents are now in Hatchlands Park, the Newbridge cabinet of curiosities was recreated, a replica of the wallpaper produced from memory by Alec, the cases brought down from the attic, and a replica sample of the collection once more on display. Meanwhile, at the far end of the house stands the red drawing room, another addition made by Thomas and Lady Betty Cobbe, working with local architect George Semple. Some 45 feet long, the room has a ceiling featuring ‘a sea of scrolling leaves and floral garlands encircled by dragons and birds fighting over baskets of fruit,’ believed to have been undertaken by stuccodore Richard Williams, a pupil of Robert West. Two hundred years ago, payments for furniture were made to Woods & Son, and to Mack, Williams & Gibton of Dublin, who were also paid for curtains in 1828. The carpet, by Beck & Co. of Bath was supplied in March 1823 for £64 and 18 shillings, while the crimson flock wallpaper and matching border came from the Dublin firm of Patrick Boylan. The present arrangement of paintings, the greater part of them collected during the previous century by Archbishop Cobbe and his son and daughter-in-law, dates from the same period. Some of the collection had been sold in Dublin in 1812, and in 1839 two key paintings – by Hobbema and Dughet – were sold to pay to fund the construction of some 80 estate workers’ cottages. In November of that year, then owner Charles Cobbe wrote in his diary, ‘I have filled up the vacancies on my walls occasioned by the loss of the two pictures which have been sold, and I felt some satisfaction in thinking that my room (by the new arrangement) looks even more furnished than before.’ Such is still the case today, thanks to Alec. Over many years, he undertook successive projects to preserve and conserve the drawing room, so that today it is a rare example of late Irish Georgian taste. There were several other projects in this country with which Alec was closely associated, not least the redecoration of the drawing room at Russborough, County Wicklow (see A Room Reborn « The Irish Aesthete). Having served alongside him as trustee of a charitable foundation, the Irish Aesthete can testify to his indefatigable enthusiasm and diverse range of interests. Sadly, he has not lived to see the publication of his latest book, Inside the Country Houses of Britain & Ireland, due to be published by Rizzoli in September. Let it serve as a lasting memorial to the polymath that was Alec Cobbe.