A detail of the frieze that runs around the hemispherical ceiling of what was originally Lord Charlemont’s study in the Casino at Marino in Dublin (see Casino Royale, March 25th). Located in the eastern arm of the Greek Cross building, this is known as the Zodiac Room since, as can be seen, the frieze is decorated with astrological signs. It has been proposed that originally the ceiling was painted to represent the northern firmament but today only the plasterwork remains.
Venturing outside the Irish Aesthete’s customary sphere, today we consider the career of Irish couturier Sybil Connolly who sixty years ago this month came to international prominence following a fashion show in County Meath. ‘Ireland,’ wrote former American Vogue editor Bettina Ballard in her 1960 memoir In My Fashion, ‘was a completely unexpected centre for fashion for everyone but Carmel Snow. We were drawn en-masse to Dublin by the personable, milk-skinned Irish charmer called Sybil Connolly who showed a small collection made of Irish tweeds and linens in Dunsany Castle and bewitched us all into buying models or filling our editorial pages with them.’
It comes as no surprise that the incomparable Carmel Snow, outstanding editor of Harper’s Bazaar for over a quarter century, should have championed Sybil since she too was Irish, having been born in Dalkey, County Dublin in 1887 (for more about Snow’s life and work I recommend Penelope Rowlands’ 2005 biography A Dash of Daring). Presumably she and the designer had met when the latter first visited New York in 1952 and thereafter they remained friends. Certainly Snow was responsible for ensuring a large group of American buyers and journalists, en route to Paris for the couture shows, stopped off in Ireland to see the work of a rising Irish star.
After Sybil Connolly’s July 1953 fashion show, Carmel Snow wrote enthusiastically in her syndicated column of what she and the others present had been shown: ‘Miss Connolly is lovely, with jet black, curling hair and amazingly grey eyes. She came to America last spring and went back to Dublin with many orders. Today she has her foot firmly planted on the ladder of international success – a success that gives one a glow.’ As for the clothes, Snow attributed their appeal to a number of factors: ‘Her integrity in using exclusively Irish materials and using them with strict relevance to native needs; her imaginative adaptation of traditional Connemara garments for contemporary use; her colossal capacity for hard work; her respect for native craftsmanship and the age-old independence of weaver and dyer, and a parallel determination to guide and suggest where she is far too intelligent to demand.’
Throughout her career Sybil was fortunate to have women of influence and authority offering their support in this way. For example, the most powerful woman in American public relations Eleanor Lambert was a close friend for decades (indeed, it was through Sybil that I came to know Eleanor and to sit on the adjudicating panel for her International Best Dressed List – but all that is perhaps for another occasion). Then there were the well-connected women who helped by buying the clothes and promoting her name, not least Sheila, Lady Dunsany who offered the use of beautiful Dunsany Castle for that show in July 1953. (I remember Sheila Dunsany’s wry amusement as she told me some months before her death in July 1999 that Sybil, whose Welsh mother’s maiden name was Phillips, liked to claim an affinity since this was also Sheila’s family name). Then look at the pictures above and note that in the first of these the models photographed by Norman Parkinson for Vogue in July 1954 are Ladies Melissa and Caroline Wyndham-Quin, daughters of the sixth Earl of Dunraven, while that below, taken by Henry Clarke, shows one-time model Anne Gunning who by this date was married to English politician Sir Anthony Nutting.
Sybil Connolly’s signature design was a dress made from pleated handkerchief linen. She used to say that she first discovered this featherweight fabric in a Northern Irish factory where it had been manufactured many years earlier for the crowned heads of Europe, but after the First World War ‘there weren’t enough of them left around.’ Sybil had the linen tightly pleated to produce lengths which were thed used to make clothes. Nine yards of linen were required to produce one yard of finished pleated material. The first garment made in this way to be shown in the United States, a white evening dress called First Love, required three hundred handkerchiefs and contained more than five thousand pleats (see bottom picture which shows Sybil wearing the item).
The great merit of her pleated linen was that it was uncrushable – and virtually indestructible. I recently came across one of her dresses in a box in Birr Castle; it had been made for the late Anne Rosse. Although not worn for decades after a quick shake the dress fell into place and looked much as it must have done when first produced. Harper’s Bazaar noted in June 1958 that a Connolly pleated linen skirt ‘will pack into a small duffle bag and emerge unscathed.’ Sybil’s pleated linen is as remarkable a contribution to fashion history as was Mariano Fortuny’s Delphos pleated silk dress half a century earlier and will similarly be forever associated with the name of one designer.
As can be seen by the two pictures immediately above, Sybil did not only use pleated linen, but also worked with other fabrics, the majority of them associated with Ireland. So, for example, she bought bales of red flannel traditionally used for petticoats in Connemara and had the material made into quilted skirts which were then teamed with white cambric blouses and black shawls to create an early version of peasant chic. She was not above using seemingly mundane material: a dress called Kitchen Fugue from her summer 1954 collection, for example, had a full skirt made from lengths of striped tea towels. But her clothes more often featured the likes of hand-dyed tweed and hand-made Carrickmacross lace and crochet.
In her heyday – the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s, Sybil Connolly was internationally renowned and enjoyed huge success, especially in the United States where her clientele included members of the du Pont, Mellon and Rockefeller families as well as the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Rosalind Russell and Merle Oberon. Jacqueline Kennedy’s official portrait for the White House (painted by Aaron Shikler) shows the former First Lady wearing one of Sybil’s outfits. Although she lived until May 1998 and always kept herself busy through such projects as designing fabrics for Brunschwig & Fils and china for Tiffany, already by 1970 her moment as a fashion leader had come to an end. Still, it is worth remembering just what a pioneer she was for Irish design and how, thanks to a show staged sixty years ago, she turned the global fashion spotlight on this country.
To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of her July 1953 fashion show, I shall be giving a talk on Sybil Connolly at the Little Museum of Dublin next Wednesday 24th July at 7pm. For further information, see http://www.littlemuseum.ie
Art dealer and collector Sir Hugh Lane drawn by the artist John Butler Yeats in August 1905. At the time, Yeats was engaged in producing a series of portraits of notable Irish men and women, a commission he received from Lane who intended these works to form the core of a National Portrait Gallery for Ireland. Within three years he had instead established a modern art gallery in Dublin which continues to this day. To learn more about Lane, and about the controversy over a collection of Impressionist paintings after his unexpected death in 1915, you can now watch two short films featuring the Irish Aesthete:
The central entrance on the north front of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, a building begun in 1680 to the design of Sir William Robinson. The previous year Arthur Forbes, 1st Earl of Granard and Marshal of the Garrisons of Ireland, had visited Paris and seen the newly-completed Invalides. He proposed to Charles II that a similar military hospital for elderly or disabled veterans be built in Dublin and the king duly commanded that this should be (work on its equivalent in Chelsea started two years later). The foundation stone was laid by then-Viceroy James Ormond, 1st Duke of Ormond and it is his coat of arms that can be seen above the doorway’s segmental pediment flanked by Corinthian pilasters. As Christine Casey has observed, the impact of this classical building on what was still essentially a mediaeval city must have been enormous: ‘It was such a sight that in 1684 a rule was introduced forbidding residents to accept gratuities from visitors who came to see it.’ Currently undergoing structural repair, since 1990 the Royal Hospital has housed the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Since last October work has been underway restoring the City Assembly House on South William Street, Dublin. This week it will be possible for members of the public to see the results of this enterprise and to (re)discover an important part of the city’s 18th century architectural heritage.
The City Assembly House dates from the second half of the 1760s and was built by and for the Society of Artists of Ireland. It was an idealistic organisation which believed the best means of advancing interest in and awareness of the creative arts in the country was to have a venue where these skills could be taught and the results put on display. Thus the core of the building is a top-lit octagonal space 40 feet wide and 33 feet high. Today this is the oldest purpose-built exhibition gallery in Britain and Ireland.
While the gallery occupies the rear of the City Assembly House, the front section was intended to hold offices for the society as well as rooms where students could learn to draw, paint and sculpt. It is this forward area which has now been restored by the Irish Georgian Society, wishing to give the old building a new lease of life.
The City Assembly House has had a somewhat chequered career, since the society responsible for its erection had gone out of existence by 1780. Thereafter the premises were used for debates, shows, balls, masques and so forth until the building was acquired by Dublin Corporation in the early 1800s. It then acted as City Hall for half a century before becoming a law court and, in more memory, a civic museum. The last of these ceased to operate out of the building a decade ago and since then the City Assembly House has stood empty.
Now the IGS has assumed responsibility for the City Assembly House and for its complete restoration. The first phase was completed a few weeks ago, returning the front of the structure to its original understated elegance. Of particular interest is a top-lit staircase that cleverly climbs up and accommodates landings at different levels to front and rear. The stairs terminate in a handsome oval gallery beneath a glazed dome that provides light down to the ground floor and in particular draws attention to the pretty rococo cornice. Much of this had become indiscernible behind layers of paint and while certain sections required repair, a surprising amount of the original plasterwork has survived intact. Other discoveries included splendid neo-classical decoration in the large first floor room overlooking South William Street, and a granite wall on the ground floor return. Original floors have been cleaned and repaired, chimney pieces reinstated and doors repaired. The result is an absolute delight.
As of last month the City Assembly House is the headquarters of the IGS, but it has always been intended the building should open to the public. And so it will from Wednesday on, with a reception area and bookshop just inside the front door and the main gallery used for temporary exhibitions, beginning with photographs from the Vanishing Ireland project of James Fennell and Turtle Bunbury (until August 31st). Admission is free, so anyone visiting Dublin – or indeed living there – should take this opportunity to delight in one of the city’s lesser-known architectural gems, and to learn more about the work of the IGS. Incidentally, funds permitting it is hoped to begin full restoration of the main exhibition gallery next year.
For more information about the City Assembly House, and the work of the Irish Georgian Society, see http://www.igs.ie
Rathfarnham Castle, County Dublin as depicted in a watercolour by the Huguenot artist Gabriel Beranger in 1774. It shows the structure, built around 1583 for Adam Loftus, Lord Chancellor of Ireland and Protestant Archbishop of Dublin as a semi-fortified residence, after it had been extensively altered by his descendants in the 18th century.
In state ownership since 1987, today and tomorrow Rathfarnham Castle is the venue for the Period Buildings Show, an event organised by the Irish Georgian Society & South Dublin County Council, in partnership with the Office of Public Works. Ireland’s leading conservation practitioners will demonstrate everything from sash window repairs and stained glass and fanlight conservation to stone carving and traditional wallpaper making. Inside the house will be talks on a variety of topics relating to conservation. The occasion ought not to be missed especially since, mirabile dictu, admission is free.
For further information see: http://www.igs.ie/Programmes/Conservation-Outreach.aspx
A key figure in the emergence of neo-classicism in the 18th century, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart was apprenticed as a child to a London fan painter. In 1742 at the age of 29 he set out on foot for Italy – no Grand Tour for this impoverished young man – and once there worked as both a painter and a guide to antiquities. At some point he met the affluent Suffolk gentleman Nicholas Revett and in 1748 the two men, together with painter Gavin Hamilton and architect Matthew Brettingham visited Naples in order to study Greek monuments in that part of the country.
As a result of their Neapolitan excursion, Stuart and Revett determined to travel to Greece to measure and record some of that country’s antiquities; while detailed scholarly studies of Roman ruins had already been undertaken, no equivalent work existed for Greek remains. The pair sought funds to undertake a “new and accurate description of the Antiquities &c. in the Province of Attica.” Under the auspices of the Society of Dilettanti and with donations from other patrons, in 1751 Stuart and Revett set off for Greece – then part of the Ottoman Empire – and remained there for several years during which they took accurate measurements and made drawings of various ancient buildings examined.
Although Stuart and Revett returned to London in 1755, it was only seven years later that the first of their influential five-volume Antiquities of Athens and Other Monuments of Greece appeared. Among the buildings included in this work was the Tower of the Winds or Horologium in Athens. Erected around 100-50 B.C. by Andronicus of Cyrrhus to measure time, it is an octagonal structure 42 feet high and 26 feet wide; each of the building’s eight sides faces a point of the compass and was decorated with a frieze representing a different wind deity and a sundial below. Originally the roof was topped with a weather vane in the form of a bronze triton while the interior contained a water clock to record time when the sun was not shining. By the mid-18th century only half the tower was above ground and in order to produce accurate drawings Stuart and Revett had to organise for a fifteen-feet deep trench to be dug, and for a further seven feet of debris to be removed from its interior, then being used by whirling dervishes.
The ancient Tower of the Winds in Athens was the inspiration for two garden buildings designed by Stuart, the first a Temple of the Winds completed in 1765 at Shugborough, Staffordshire and originally surrounded by an ornamental lake. Almost twenty years later Stuart revisited the concept to create another Temple of the Winds, this time at Mount Stewart, County Down for Robert Stewart, future first Marquess of Londonderry. As their surname indicates, the Stewarts were a Scottish settler family; their wealth was immeasurably increased when Robert’s father married Mary Cowan, an heiress with shares in the East India Company. It was her money that paid for the purchase of the Mount Stewart estate overlooking Strangford Lough. The site chosen for Stuart’s Temple of the Winds is at the top of a rise in the parkland, and offers sweeping views across the lough and towards the Mourne Mountains.
Stuart, who died only a couple of years after the building’s completion, never visited Ireland to see his design put into effect. Nevertheless the quality of workmanship throughout is flawless. Mount Stewart’s Temple of the Winds owes much of its inspiration to the Athens original but is not an exact copy (see the gouache of that building made by Stuart while still in Greece). Faced in local Scrabo sandstone, it does not have a frieze running around the upper walls, and the side porticos are not pedimented but have balustrades or viewing platforms to take advantage of the views. To the rear, as at Shugborough, there is a domed three-quarter-round extension holding a spiral staircase. The interior is of three storeys: a basement for services; a relatively plain ground floor reception room; and, the real glory of the building, a saloon or banqueting hall on the first floor. Every detail of this space is superlatively decorated, from the marble chimneypiece supplied by London carver John Adair through the low relief plasterwork ceiling by Dublin stuccadore William Fitzgerald to the complementarily decorated marquetry floor composed of mahogany, walnut, sycamore, box and bog oak: the result is a room of restrained sumptuosity. In the care of the National Trust for the past half-century, the Temple of the Winds is without question one of the most perfect small buildings in Ireland.
The largest house on Merrion Square today is no. 45 which dates from 1785. As mentioned before (see The Fashionable Side, September 24th), it was built by Gustavus Hume who when not acting as a medical surgeon dabbled in property development, being also responsible for laying out Ely Place and Hume Street to the south-west of Merrion Square. Five bays wide and rising four storeys over basement, no. 45 has a restrained neo-classical interior with ground and first floor rooms radiating off an immense cantilevered Portland stone staircase.
For the past decade the building has been home to the Irish Architectural Archive. Founded in 1976 the IAA is an independent charity which receives some state assistance but relies on private support to sustain its services. The organisation’s holdings at present include 2.5 million drawings and documents, 500,000 photographs and 30,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals: the greatest single source of information on Ireland’s buildings and those who designed them, this material is freely available for research to all visitors.
Unfortunately at the moment the IAA like so many other cultural bodies is suffering from inadequate funding and unless additional monies are found, it will have to shut for the months of July and August, with the small body of staff made temporarily redundant. One must worry that if this is permitted to happen, a precedent will have been set, not just for the IAA but similar establishments too. Anybody interested in helping to ensure the IAA’s future can find more information at http://www.iarc.ie/sponsors/funding-appeal. With its graceful late 18th century plasterwork by Michael Stapleton, the door shown below faces the top of the main staircase. How dreadful were it, along with all the others in the building, to be closed in a few weeks’ time.
An architectural quirk on Merrion Street Upper in central Dublin. Developed during the second half of the 18th century, the road at this point suddenly narrows with the result that No.20 extends beyond its neighbours to the immediate north. Different coloured brickwork indicates the fourth storey is a later addition to the building when the roof height was raised, but the really distinctive feature is an elongated Wyatt window on the first floor. Note how the fenestration on the side components of the tripartite sash window differs from that in the central unit and how the whole is capped with a segmental arch incorporating a blind fanlight. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice was wont to exclaim.
You can read more about Dublin in a piece I have written for the June issue of American Elle Decor.
Readers of Selina Guinness’ memoir The Crocodile by the Door ought to recognise the open-mouthed beast seen above. It was shot in Persia by the brother of the author’s great-granfather, the head then stuffed amd mounted by a taxidermist in London before being sent to Ireland to serve as a letterbox. Ever since the crocodile’s bonce has been found in the entrance hall of Tibradden, County Dublin although today more conventional methods of despatching letters are employed. Designed by Dublin architect Joseph Maguire, Tibradden was built in 1859 to mark the marriage of that same great-grandfather, Thomas Hosea Guinness, to Mary Davis.
I will be in conversation with both Selina Guinness and author and broadcaster Polly Devlin next Saturday June 8th at the Borris House Festival of Writing and Ideas, County Carlow. For further information see http://festivalofwritingandideas.com