Category Archives: Historic Interior

The Irish Dizzy

Many people will be familiar with the life of Benjamin Disraeli, popularly known as ‘Dizzy’, leader of the British Conservative party from 1868 until his death in 1881, twice Prime Minister during that period, and a great favourite of Queen Victoria. Much less well-known will be an Irish man of slightly earlier period with a strikingly similar name. Benjamin Disraell (c. 1766-1814) has betimes been proposed as an uncle of the future premier, although it is worth noting the slightly different spelling of his surname (it ends with a double l rather than an i). Furthermore, as was pointed out by Bernard Shillman, (writing in the Dublin Historical Record Vol. 3, No. 4, Jun. – Aug., 1941), Disraeli’s father Isaac is reported to have been an only son, meaning he would not have had a brother. As for the Irish Mr Disraell, while his origins are appear uncertain (he may have come to Ireland as a youth, and it has been proposed that he was of French Huguenot extraction), in December 1795 he is registered as – as a public notary – entering a Deed of Partnership with one Joseph Walker of Anglesea Street, Dublin to buy and sell lottery tickets and shares, etc., and deal generally in the ‘trade, art or mystery’ of the lottery business from premises at 105 Grafton Street. Almost five years later, in July 1800, Messrs Walker and Disraell advertised in the Freeman’s Journal that ‘the only Prize of £30,000 ever sold in this Kingdom’ had been obtained fromtheir office, ‘besides an innumerable Quantity of minor Prizes, such as £5,000, £2,000 £1,000, £500 etc., etc., etc.’  Shillman noted the memorial of a lease, dated 31st August, 1801, by Benjamin Disraell to Hugh Fitzpatrick, printer and bookseller, the premises described as No. 4 East Side of Capel Street near Essex Bridge for 47 years at an annual rental of £120. This is the building which can be seen in James Malton’s print of Essex Bridge and Capel Street published in 1797.

Benjamin Disraell was sufficiently successful in business that by the age of 35, he was able to retire to the country, buying an estate called Bettyfield, near Rathvilly, County Carlow. Although extensively altered c.1825, the core of the house here dates from around 1780, a five-bay, three-storey over basement building. Now called Beechy Park, since 2008 it has been owned by horse trainer Jim Bolger. Unhappily, Mr Disraell was not to enjoy his property for long, dying in 1814, at the age of 48; he was buried in the churchyard of St Peter’s, Dublin. His will made provision for a number of bequests for charitable purposes.Among these was the sum of £1,000 ‘to be expended in building a good and substantial house as near to the town of Rathvilly as may be, for the purpose of a free school for the education of poor children, and accommodation for a schoolmaster; the further sum of £2,000 for the endowment of said school, to be conducted on the most enlightened and liberal principles, under the care and superintendence of the Lord Bishop of Leighlin and Ferns.’

The schoolhouse constructed thanks to Benjamin Disraell’s bequest opened in 1826 and continued to serve the same purpose until 1977. It was designed by County Cork-born Joseph Welland, who would later go on to become Architect to the Board of First Fruits and subsequently to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Standing in its own grounds, from the exterior, the building suggests it might be a small Palladian villa. Of cut granite, it has six bays, with round-headed recessed windows in the centre block and flanking bays to pedimented wings. Inside, the former school is larger than initially appears to be the case. The wings each hold a large, high-ceilinged chamber (presumably once classrooms), while the centre block is of three storeys with several rooms at each level. After it ceased to operate as a school, the property was converted into a community centre but in recent weeks has been offered for sale at a price of €275,000. A building of high quality and fine design, one must hope that it soon finds a new owner, someone who will cherish this legacy of the Irish Dizzy.

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Twins in Trinity



In Trinity College Dublin’s Front (otherwise known as Parliament) Square, two buildings with identical facades look across at each other. Planned in the mid-1770s by Sir William Chambers, but executed by Christopher Myers (and then completed after the latter’s death by his son Graham Myers), that to the north holds the college Chapel, that to the south the Theatre, now Examination Hall. Both are of five bays, with the three centre bays featuring a ground-floor arcade supporting Corinthian columns below a substantial pediment. While these are faced in Portland stone, the flanking single bay three storey offices are of granite ashlar. Yet, while the exteriors look the same, the interiors are very differen






Built 1777-86, and therefore preceding the nearby Chapel by a decade, Trinity College Dublin’s Theatre, now Examination Hall, is a five-bay hall with elliptical groin vaulted ceiling and plasterwork created by stuccodore Michael Stapleton. In a gallery above the facade arcade can be seen a gilded organ case was made in 1684 by Lancelot Pease, while the chandelier at the south end of the hall formerly hung in the Irish House of Commons. The walls here are hung with a series of portraits commissioned from Robert Home in1782, their frames carved by Richard Cranfield. However, much space on the west side is taken up by a monument to Dr Richard Baldwin, Provost of the college from 1717 until his death in 1758’ this superlative work, dating from 1781, was designed by Christopher Hewetson. Incorporating Italian Africano marble salvaged from an ancient Roman architectural site and a sarcophagus of Porto Venere Marble with gilt bronze feet, the white marble figures were carved in Rome and installed by Edward Smyth.






Soon after the theatre was finished, work began on the college’s chapel, completed in 1798. As with the other building, this is a five-bay hall, although somewhat longer and narrower in shape, with a bowed organ gallery at the south end (carved by Richard Cranfield) and an elliptical apse at the north end.
Between the nave’s arched openings, some glazed, some blind, paired and fluted Ionic pilasters lead the eye to the coffered ceiling with its rich plasterwork by Michael Stapleton. Additional light is provided by semi-circular clerestory windows above the cornice. As so often with churches, the building experienced alterations in the 19th century altering its hitherto pure classical character. Stained glass by Clayton & Bell was installed in 1865, depicting scenes of Moses and the Children, the Ransom of the Lord, the Sermon on the Mount, and Christ with the teachers of Law. The polychrome floor tiles were added to designs of John McCurdy, and, in 1872, stained glass windows were installed in the apse and centre, showing the Transfiguration, to designs by Mayer & Company. Nevertheless, even with these changes the chapel offers an example of decorative taste in Ireland on the eve of the Act of Union. 



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A Vanishing World


Many people will be familiar with the photographs taken during the last century by the Jesuit priest, Fr Francis Browne, both those of the Titanic (which he boarded for its maiden voyage before disembarking prior to its ill-fated voyage across the Atlantic Ocean) and those depicting everyday life in Ireland. Much less well-known are the series of country house pictures that Browne began to take from the late 1940s until a few years before his death in 1960. In 1947 he received the first of a series of commissions from the Irish Tatler & Sketch, which described itself as ‘Ireland’s Premier Social & Sporting Monthly.’ Many of these pieces featured not only photographs by Browne but also texts which he had written.
No information has been found to explain how the Irish Tatler & Sketch initiated contact with Browne, but by then, thanks to his work with the various other organisations, he was well-known as a photographer of exceptional ability. Furthermore, he had already been taking pictures of historic houses for some time, since during this period quite a number of them were occupied by Catholic religious orders. His earliest images of Rathfarnham Castle, for example, date from 1920, just seven years after the building had been bought by the Jesuit order. Similarly, he often photographed Emo Court in the years after it was acquired by the same order, for many of which he lived in the building.
However, Browne now began to take pictures of houses still in secular hands. In April 1945, in a letter to his Provincial Superior, he explained that earlier that year, while in Portlaw, County Waterford to give a Triduum (a Catholic religious observance lasting three days), he had received permission to visit nearby Curraghmore, home to the de la Poer Beresfords, Marquises of Waterford. ‘I did so,’ he elaborated, ‘because I am collecting a set of Georgian Houses, & Curraghmore was on the list given me by the Georgian Society.’ It is unclear which organisation he means, since the original Georgian Society had come to an end in 1913 and its eventual successor, the Irish Georgian Society, was not established until 1958; it may be that he was using the fifth volume of the Georgian Society Records (published 1913) which contained a catalogue of important country houses throughout the country, or else perhaps another work, Georgian Mansions in Ireland by Thomas Sadleir and Page L. Dickinson, which appeared in 1915 and which devoted several pages to Curraghmore.   In any case, it says a great deal about Fr Browne’s character and a reflection of his personal charm that he was able to gain access to so many houses at a time when they were still in private hands and not open to the public.

Killeen Castle, County Meath

The first country house photographed by Browne to appear in the Irish Tatler & Sketch was Shelton Abbey, County Wicklow, home for some 200 years to the Howards, Earls of Wicklow. By now it was home to the last of the family to live there, William Howard, eighth earl who in 1932 had converted to Catholicism, much to the disgust of his father (seemingly, he was appalled at the idea of Shelton Abbey’s heir attending the same church as the servants). Browne had visited the house in November 1946, but the following April he sought permission to go there again, as Lord Wicklow had recently told him ‘that owing to his circumstance, he proposes utilising Shelton Abbey as a kind of hotel or “Country Club”.’ He therefore wanted Browne to return to the house and take further photographs ‘before the necessary alterations are made.’ The building was then still filled with treasures accumulated by generations of Howards, many of them captured in situ by Browne as he and his camera went from room to room. He visited in good time because the hotel venture was not a success and after just three years Lord Wicklow was obliged to sell Shelton Abbey’s contents in a spectacular auction that lasted for 13 days. The great majority of lots went to overseas buyers and left Ireland, making Browne’s pictures priceless as a guide to how the house once looked. Shelton Abbey is today an open prison and much of its interior badly affected by institutional use.



Rockingham. County Roscommon

Some of the houses photographed by Browne have either since been demolished, such as Rockingham and Frenchpark, both in County Roscommon, or left a ruin, like Killeen Castle, County Meath. A number of others that he visited – the likes of Adare Manor, County Limerick and Dromoland Castle, County Clare – are now hotels. Many more, among them Knocklofty, County Tipperary and Glananea, County Westmeath, have changed hands on more than one occasion and long lost their original contents. Happily, the story of what has happened since that time is not all bad. Some of the houses Browne visited, not least Castletown, County Kildare and Malahide Castle, County Dublin, are now in public ownership and open to visitors, while the Ormond Castle, County Tipperary has, since passing into the care of the Office of Public Works, benefitted from an extensive programme of restoration. And a few of the houses shown over the coming pages remain in the same hands and have experienced relatively little change, among them the aforementioned Curraghmore and Lismore Castle, both in County Waterford, and Dunsany Castle, County Meath.

Shelton Abbey, County Wicklow

While Browne photographed more than 50 country houses, he did not cover all of Ireland. Had he been a free agent, he might have taken pictures of a great many other places but he could only go where he was permitted to go by his superiors in the Jesuit order; many visits to these historic properties were tagged on to other trips undertaken in the course of his work as a Catholic priest. In consequence, there are omissions. An obvious absence is Northern Ireland which, in the decades after Independence, Browne does not appear to have visited. Most of the houses he photographed were in the east, the Midlands and the south. Other than the two Roscommon properties already mentioned, the West is unrepresented, and, aside from two houses in County Louth and one in County Monaghan, he took no pictures of houses north of Dublin.
These gaps are regrettable but, given the photographer’s circumstances, understandable. We must be grateful that Browne managed to visit so many old houses and record them for posterity before the majority underwent irrevocable change. Not all of them feature in a new book, A Vanishing World: The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne, published this week. Limitations of space and the desire to give adequate space to the houses included in the present work means many more had to be left out. In a small number of cases, the pictures are not of the best quality or of insufficient number to merit their presence. In others, the houses have already been well documented, and images of them are easily available to anyone interested. Pictures of a few more are included in the book’s introduction, such as Mespil House in Dublin, home for many years of the pioneering artist Sarah Purser, which Browne photographed just a couple of months after her death in August 1943. Within a decade, the mid-18th century building had been demolished, although thankfully three of its remarkable ceilings, attributed to the stuccodore Barthelemy Cramillion, were salvaged; two of them are now in Dublin Castle, and one in Aras an Uachtaráin. Then there was Lamberton, County Laois, a large two-storey Georgian houses which Browne visited in January 1944, just a few months before it was stripped of everything worth salvaging and then demolished. Heywood, also in Laois, had been acquired by the Salesian order in 1941 and Browne photographed it on two occasions, in July 1943 and September 1945. Again, these images are important because in January 1950 the house was gutted by fire and later levelled.
After the pictures of Shelton Abbey appeared in the Irish Tatler & Sketch in 1947, further examples of Browne’s country house photographs continued to appear in the magazine for a number of years, as they did in other publications, including Ireland of the Welcomes in 1953-54, and then The Irish Digest. By then he had stopped travelling so much – he was, after all, in his mid-seventies – and would lead a more retired life until his death in 1960. Like the rest of his output, for a long time his photographs of Irish country house were forgotten and even when other pictures had been rediscovered and published, this particular group has not been given much attention. This new publication therefore serves two purposes: it allows us to see how these buildings looked in the middle of the last century and it gives us an opportunity to celebrate once more the outstanding talents of Fr Francis Browne, photographer.

Frenchpark, County Roscommon

A Vanishing World: The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne is published by Messenger Publications

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A New Vision


The narrative of the Irish country house as a place of dishevelment and decay has a long and melancholic history, stretching back to the publication of Maria Edgeworth’s seminal novel Castle Rackrent in 1800. Her vision of properties and their owners both being hopelessly atrophied found many fictional heirs for almost two centuries, continuing as late as Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster, which appeared in 1977 and Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour published four years later. These accounts present variations on the same theme: that the Irish country house, dank, gloomy and bitterly cold, has no viable future and is doomed to sink into ruin. In truth, the notion of the Big House – as such buildings are traditionally known in Ireland – being in terminal decline frequently had its basis in fact. In March 1912, Violet Martin, one half of the writing duo Somerville and Ross, informed her c0-author Edith Somerville about a recent visit to Tyrone House, County Galway which she found ‘rather dilapidated and ‘where rioted three or four generations of St. Georges – living with country-women, occasionally marrying them, all illegitimate four times over. No so long ago eight of these awful half-peasant families roosted together in that lovely house, and fought, and barricaded and drank, till the police had to intervene.’ Tyrone House duly served as the inspiration for Somerville and Ross’s 1925 novel, The Big House of Inver.





Fortunately, in recent decades there have been other, and happier, stories deserving to be told, as will be discovered in The Irish Country House: A New Vision. The fifteen houses featured offer an alternative narrative, not just about historic Irish properties but about Ireland herself. Once dogged by persistent poverty and a pervasive atmosphere of dejection, since the 1990s the country has undergone something of a transformation. This change of circumstances has brought with it fresh opportunities and the promise of a better future for Irish country houses. Formerly, the sale and abandonment of big old properties was a common occurrence, but this is no longer the only or even most frequent option. Instead, the possibility of a new life has become viable. Which is not to suggest that every historic house can be assured of a secure future; there are still buildings being lost, like so many of their equivalents in the past. But the chances of salvation are now much better than used to be the case.





Almost all the properties featured in The Irish Country House: A New Vision have had to undergo extensive restoration since the start of the present century, some of them are still in the process of being restored. Had they not been acquired or inherited by the present generation of owners it is probable that at least some of them would have been lost forever.
It takes a particular kind of pluck, or perhaps madness, to assume responsibility for a house much larger than the average family home, and constructed in an era when staff to maintain the building were plentiful and cheap. Fortunately, there are people gifted with this kind of pluck, along with generous quantities of imagination and determination. These traits are particularly necessary when the house in question is currently in poor condition, sometimes even downright ruinous. Not everyone possesses the character required for the task, just as not everyone wants to take on the challenge of bringing an old house back to life. Providentially, Ireland is blessed that there are increasing numbers of them who relish the opportunity, with all its potential highs and lows. Some of them feature in the book, but there are many more who are at different stages of the journey towards the creation of a viable, comfortable family home. The hazards of taking on an historic house are obvious, cost being just one of them. But there are advantages too, not least the chance to put your own stamp on a building. Along with installing new plumbing and electric wiring, with repairing gutters and replacing damaged windows, comes the possibility of further enhancing the character of a place, of adding another distinctive chapter to its story. This is what sets apart these properties. They disprove the long-standing narrative of the Irish country house as being in irremediable decline and instead inform us that these buildings have been blessed with an irresistible and dynamic new spirit.


The Irish Country House: A New Vision is published by Rizzoli

 

Pagan Inspiration


On 6th-7th January 1839 Ireland was struck by what subsequently became known as the Night of the Big Wind. Such was the ferocity of the hurricane-force gales that many buildings throughout the country suffered damage, one of these being the Presbyterian Church in Portaferry, County Down. Originally dating from 1694 but almost entirely rebuilt in 1751, in the aftermath of the storm this structure was left in such a poor state of repair that services could no longer be held there. Accordingly the decision was taken to demolish the older church and erect a new one of the same site. The architect given the task was Belfast-born John Millar, known to have spent time in the office of Thomas Hopper in London before returning to this country. Millar’s brother was a Presbyterian minister, which explains why, between 1829 and 1839, he had been given commissions to design a number of other Presbyterian churches in Ulster. His later life seems to have been blighted by misfortune. According to an entry in the online Dictionary of Irish Architects (www.dia.ie) , after being declared bankrupt in 1854 he went to Australia, then returned home before leaving again for Australia the following year: on this second voyage, his ship was wrecked off the coast. Moving to New Zealand, he was appointed engineer to the town board of Dunedin, dismissed from the post in 1864, reinstated and then dismissed again. That same year he also lost all his possessions when his house was burned down. He died in 1876, of ‘hepatic disease, dropsy and exhaustion’. The DIA describes him as ‘a man of extravagant claims, exuberant schemes and quixotic behaviour.’  




From the start, the Portico Church won plaudits. In 1842, barely a year after it had opened for services, the local Down Recorder enthused, ‘The style of architecture which Mr Millar has adopted is that which prevailed in Greece during the architectural age of Pericles; its dimensions are sufficiently large to produce an impression of grandeur and sublimity.’ More recently, in 1970 J.S Curl commented that the building ‘would not look out of place in Helsinki or Leningrad [St Petersburg]. Indeed, this marvellous Greek temple is one of the most distinguished Neoclassical buildings in Ulster, and is in the first rank of Neoclassical designs in the whole of the British Isles.’ Various alterations have been made to the building since first constructed, not all of them necessarily beneficial; for example, at some date in the early 20th century, probably owing a problem with damp, the exterior was painted. Also in the last century, coloured glass was introduced into the windows, thereby disrupting the purity of the interior’s light. Clearly the local congregation in the 1840s must have been substantial, given the scale of the church (its predecessor seemingly had 90 seats in the aisle and another 14 in a gallery). However, in more recent decades the number attending services declined sharply and in consequence the building began to suffer from neglect. Happily in 2015 responsibility for the church was taken on by a charity, ‘Portico Ards’, which then raised £1.6 million for its complete restoration (thanks to support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and over 30 other grant raiders). While it continues to serve its original purpose on Sunday mornings, holding services for members of the Presbyterian faith, today the building also functions as an arts and heritage centre, hosting a wide variety of cultural activities.
Built at a cost of £1,999 and formally opened by Rev. Henry Cooke in September 1841, Portaferry’s Portico Church, as it’s known, is a building of very distinctive and rather unexpected character. Many of Millar’s designs for other Presbyterian communities had been classical in style, but this is something else again. The primary source of inspiration was the Temple of Nemesis, built c.460-420 BC in Rhamnous, an ancient Greek city on the north-eastern coast of Attica. The church’s north-west and south-east pedimented facades are almost identical, the former providing the main entrance to the interior via steps that lead into a porch set between the Doric columns, derived from those of the Temple of Apollo at Delos.  Six monumental columns, tapered and showing entasis, rest on top of the ground floor and rise unfluted to the entablature which encircles the structure. Clearly not based on ancient models but meeting the requirements of the congregation, the building’s glazed enclosures accommodate a vestibule for the gallery at one end and an organ chamber at the other. The church’s base takes the form of a battered podium. On the south-east side, the two outermost columns rest on battered corners bases separate from the main support; the open portion thus created by these separate bases permits access to smaller doorways into the building. Also on this side and set between the two central columns is what appears to be a miniature temple: inside this accommodates a staircase allowing the minister taking services to ascend to the pulpit. 




From the start, the Portico Church won plaudits. In 1842, barely a year after it had opened for services, the local Down Recorder enthused, ‘The style of architecture which Mr Millar has adopted is that which prevailed in Greece during the architectural age of Pericles; its dimensions are sufficiently large to produce an impression of grandeur and sublimity.’ More recently, in 1970 J.S Curl commented that the building ‘would not look out of place in Helsinki or Leningrad [St Petersburg]. Indeed, this marvellous Greek temple is one of the most distinguished Neoclassical buildings in Ulster, and is in the first rank of Neoclassical designs in the whole of the British Isles.’ Various alterations have been made to the building since first constructed, not all of them necessarily beneficial; for example, at some date in the early 20th century, probably owing a problem with damp, the exterior was painted. Also in the last century, coloured glass was introduced into the windows, thereby disrupting the purity of the interior’s light and the first organ installed. Clearly the local congregation in the 1840s must have been substantial, given the scale of the church (its predecessor seemingly had 90 seats in the aisle and another 14 in a gallery). However, in more recent decades the number attending services declined sharply and in consequence the building began to suffer from neglect. Happily in 2015 responsibility for the church was taken on by a charity, ‘Portico Ards’, which then raised £1.6 million for its complete restoration (thanks to support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and over 30 other grant raiders). While it continues to serve its original purpose on Sunday mornings, holding services for members of the Presbyterian faith, today the building also functions as an arts and heritage centre, hosting a wide variety of cultural activities and thereby ensuring that it has a viable future.  

Still in Use


Every year in the second half of August Ireland celebrates Heritage Week, with many events coordinated by the National Heritage Council. As this site has demonstrated since 2012, the country has a singularly rich architectural heritage, although too much of it remains insufficiently appreciated and cherished. One area of the past’s legacy that often receives too little are our religious buildings, not least the abundance of churches either constructed, restored or enlarged by the Church of Ireland in the late 18th/early 19th centuries. As has been discussed here before, many of these benefited from funds provided by the Board of First Fruits (for more on this body and its work, see Made Better By Their Presents II « The Irish Aesthete). However, declining attendance over the past 100 years means a large number of these churches are no longer in use, quite a lot of them derelict and roofless. But some remain in use and in excellent condition, a tribute to the faith of earlier generations and to the various craftsmen responsible for the buildings’ creation. To mark this year’s Heritage Week, here is one such building: Nun’s Cross Church, County Wicklow.





The predecessor of Nun’s Cross Church was the now-ruined medieval church of nearby Killiskey, the first mention of which is in a Papal document dating from 1179, by which time this part of the country formed part of the Diocese of Glendalough (later absorbed into the Diocese of Dublin). However, like so many other such buildings Killiskey church likely suffered badly during the upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries, and their aftermath. Accordingly, in 1813 the Select Vestry of Wicklow Parish determined to build a new church on a fresh site, the land being provided by Charles and Frances Tottenham who lived nearby. As originally completed in 1817, Nun’s Cross was a standard barn-style church with a square tower at the west end; the north and south transepts, together with the chancel, were added in 1842. There has been some discussion about who might have been the architect responsible, not least because Francis Johnston received two substantial commissions from landowners in the immediate vicinity, the aforementioned Charles Tottenham for whom he enlarged Ballycurry, and Francis Synge (great-grandfather of John Millington Synge) for whom he transformed Glanmore, hitherto a classical house, into a battlemented castle. Johnston also designed a new Church of Ireland church in Arklow, some 15 miles to the south, which was consecrated in 1815, two years before Nun’s Cross. However, Patricia Butler in her excellent book marking the bicentenary of Nun’s Cross, also discusses that another Dublin-based architect, William Farrell, who had worked with Johnston until his dismissal in 1810, might have had a hand in the church’s design. One curious feature of the building’s interior are the male and female heads serving as corbels for the ceiling’s ribbed vaulting; these are not dissimilar to those found inside Johnston’s Chapel Royal in Dublin Castle, where work began in 1807. The carving there was undertaken by father and son Edward and John Smyth but Butler proposes that at Nun’s Cross the work was undertaken by a plasterer called Darcy who lived in nearby Ashford and who is known to have worked with Johnston on the Chapel Royal. 





As mentioned, the chancel and transepts were added in 1842 to the designs of Frederick Darley who for many years worked in the office of Francis Johnston; a Vestry Room and Coal Store were added to the building 40 years later. In 1904, to celebrate the safe return of his son from the Boer War, Charles George Tottenham paid the entire cost of covering the walls of the chancel in decorative blind arcading with red marble from County Cork and alabaster imported from Derbyshire; the scheme was designed by architect Richard Orpen (a brother of the artist William Orpen), founder and first secretary of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland. The oak pulpit, prayer desk and pulpit, all dating from 1905, were all carved by the Flemish sculptor Pieter De Wispelaere who also produced work for Maynooth College Chapel, County Kildare and Carlow Cathedral. Much of the nave continues to be lit by clear mullioned glass set into traceried windows. The glass in the church’s great East Window dates from 1902/3 when made by Kempe & Company of London and installed by the Crofton family in memory of one of their number, Major Henry Crofton, killed in South Africa in 1902. Two other windows on the south wall of the chancel date from 1882 and 1935, the earlier one attributed to London firm of Cox, Buckley & Co, the later made by An Túr Gloine in Dublin. The stained glass windows in the south and north transepts, installed in memory of various local families and all dating from the 1860s, were made by various firms. All the glass here was restored some 15 years ago. There are also a number of memorials to the deceased inside the church, not least those on the west wall of the south transept, almost entirely covered in plaques to members of the Tottenham family. Given how many Irish of Ireland churches stand empty and neglected, it is wonderful to see this building so well maintained and still in active use

Rescued from Ruin


The extraordinary work of sibling stuccodores Paolo and Filippo Lafranchini, born in the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino but resident in Ireland for many years, has featured here before (see, among others, To the Muses « The Irish Aesthete and Exuberance « The Irish Aesthete). A relatively little known example of their skills can be found in Riverstown, a house to the immediate north-east of Cork city. The land on which the property stands came into the possession of the Browne family in the second half of the 17th century, but assumed much of its present appearance after 1733 when it became the residence of Dr Jemmet Browne, a Church of Ireland clergyman who would serve successively as Bishop of Killaloe, Dromore, Cork and Ross, Elphin and finally Archbishop of Tuam, which position he held at the time of his death in 1782. The earliest known reference to Riverstown is found in Charles Smith’s The Ancient And Present State of the County and City of Cork, published in 1750, where it is described as ‘a pleasant seat of the Lord Bishop of Cork. The house is beautified with several curious pieces of stucco, performed by the Francinis, brothers.’ We know, therefore, that the work executed in the saloon at Riverstown was carried out either before Browne became Bishop of Cork (1745) or very soon afterwards. And that he continued to carry out improvements on the building in the years after Smith’s book appeared, since a hopper is dated 1753. The exterior gives little idea of the rich decoration inside. The entrance front is modest, of two storeys and five bays, although what was the garden front is more substantial, running to seven bays and three storeys. The north end of the house the gable ends were replaced by a pair of full-height canted bays, that to the front climbing an additional storey, this last alteration believed to date from c.1830

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It tells us a great deal about this country’s cosmopolitan culture in the 18th century that a Church of Ireland clergyman – and one who rose to become an archbishop – should have decorated his private residence with pagan iconography. The saloon in Riverstown includes a series of eight panels across three walls, all of them including figures. The fourth wall has three windows and between these are a pair of mirror set in elaborate frames. The ceiling is also covered in stuccowork, centred on an oval frame derived from Nicolas Poussin’s Le Temps soustrait La  Vérité aux atteints de L’Envie et de la Discorde, painted in 1641 for Cardinal Richelieu and now in the Louvre. As for the figurative wall panels,for a long time thought as being random, the source for these was identified by Joseph McDonnell in 1991 as being taken directly from the Roman antiquarian Paolo Alessandro Maffei’s edition of Leonardo Agostini’s Gemme Antiche Figurate, published 1707-09. Beginning with the chimneypiece, the panel above it depicts the mythological Roman figure of Marcus Curtius on horseback, while next to it is one showing Aeneas carrying his father Anchises. The third panel shows Liberty, followed by Ceres and then Fides Publica, Fortuna and Cincinnatus. Finally, the panel at the far end of the room and facing the chimneypiece depicts Roma mounted in a chariot. That chimneypiece is not the original one (which is now in a first floor bedroom) but a replacement installed during restoration work in the 1960s). As already mentioned, between the three windows are two framed mirrors (still holding their original glass) surrounded by elaborate plasterwork incorporating flowers, foliage and female busts. The opposite wall is centred on a door, its frame with a finely carved broken pediment. To the north of the saloon are a pair of bow-ended drawing rooms, again much of their present decoration dating from the 1960s restoration of Riverstown. 






Riverstown remained in the possession of the Browne family until the middle of the last century but by the 1950s it stood empty and the threat of irreparable deterioration seemed so likely that moulds of the saloon were made by the Office of Public Works; these were installed in the Irish President’s residence Áras an Uachtaráin. Not long afterwards Riverstown and its surrounding land were bought by a Cork market gardener, John Dooley who in the mid-1960s collaborated with the Irish Georgian Society on restoring the building, thanks to donations from the public. By the end of 1965 Riverstown’s saloon had been restored to its former beauty, the initial work costing £717. The Dooleys were sufficiently inspired by this initiative to undertaken further work on the house and in the IGS’s January-March 1970 Bulletin, it was reported that one of the house’s two late 18th century drawing rooms ‘has been given a new dado, architraves, chimney-piece, overdoors and overmantel.’  Ten years after the society’s initial involvement, still more work had been achieved as a feature in the Cork Evening Echo noted, with the second drawing room walls covered in green silk and hung with 18th century pictures. Riverstown continues to be home to the Dooley family.

Where Turkeys Voted for Christmas


Like their English equivalent, for many centuries Ireland’s Houses of Parliament lacked purpose-built quarters, instead meeting in various locations, not least a hall in Dublin Castle. However, following Charles II’s restoration to the throne in 1660, the government leased Chichester House, a residence in central Dublin dating from the reign of Elizabeth I which in the early 17th century had been used as the country’s law courts. Overlooking Hoggen (subsequently College Green) and adjacent to Trinity College Dublin, despite its eminent position the building soon proved to be unsatisfactory for its new purpose and by 1728 a decision had been taken that it should be replaced. This was despite, or perhaps because, of the country’s economic circumstances then being in a poor condition: Edward McParland has proposed that William Conolly, then Speaker of the House of Commons and likely one of the driving forces behind the project (although he died while work on the site was ongoing) would have seen the new parliament building’s construction as reflationary; in 1721 George Berkeley, specifically mentioning such an undertaking, argued that it would ‘employ many Hands’ and at the same time ‘keep the Mony circulating at home…’ Likewise, when finished, Robert Howard, Bishop of Elphin, while thinking the Houses of Parliament were ‘too fine for us,’ consoled himself with the thought that at least ‘it hath chiefly employed our own hands.’ Once it had been decided to embark on this enterprise, progress was fast. In January 1728 a building committee was empowered to receive plans, and less than a month later it sought these from Edward Lovett Pearce: he submitted these in early March. The foundation stone was laid in February 1729 and by November of that year, ‘the Walls and Roof…are now near finished and compleat.’ In October 1731 the two houses of the Irish Parliament assembled for the first time in their newly completed chambers. 





Described by Christine Casey as ‘arguably the most accomplished public set-piece of the Palladian style in these islands,’ Edward Lovett Pearce’s building was also the first purpose-built bicameral assembly in Europe. Overlooking College Green, the former Houses of Parliament has a forecourt dominated by a towering Ionic colonnade of Portland stone in front of Granite walls. The only original decoration to this austere facade is the royal coat of arms set into the tympanum (the three figures above, of Hibernia flanked by Fidelity and Commerce, were added in the early 19th century after the building had changed purposes). There were separate entrances for the Houses of Commons and Lords respectively and while the former chamber no longer exists ((it was, in any case, badly damaged by fire in 1792 before being dismantled barely a decade later), the latter has survived with relatively few changes. In Francis G James’s Lords of the Ascendancy, his book on the Irish House of Lords 1600-1800, the author notes that the number of this country’s peers was never very great. In the first three quarters of the 18th century, there were between 100 and 150 families possessing Irish titles, but James notes that only 60 percent of these spent a substantial amount of time in Ireland (some of them had Irish titles but no land or connections here, others were Roman Catholics or émigrés, unable or unwilling to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown). Accordingly, the number of peers attending the Irish House of Lords was often considerably less than 100, to which can be added the 22 Lords Spiritual (four Archbishops and 18 Bishops) who also had a right to seats in the upper house, although again many of them did not attend regularly. This explains the relatively small size of the House of Lords, since it never had to hold too many people. The room is tripartite, with an entrance area, the main chamber and the throne apse. Tall and barrel-vaulted with a coffered ceiling, it is lit by thermal windows at either end. The entrance area and apse are entirely panelled in oak with round-headed niches and engaged Ionic columns. The main chamber is panelled in the lower section, above which are giant Corinthian pilasters on either side of walls dominated by a pair of tapestries. Commissioned for the space in 1728, they depict William III at the Battle of the Boyne (above the oak chimneypiece) and the Siege of Derry. When assembled, the peers would have sat here upon benches and wool-sacks. No image of them doing so appears to exist (whereas there is a painting of 1780 by Francis Wheatley that depicts the Irish House of Commons in session). 




In the last quarter of the 18th century, Ireland’s parliament sought to exercise its independent authority to a greater extent than had previously been the case, leading to a series of political crises as the government in London sought to curtail Irish legislators’ power. In 1782, for example, what became known as ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ (after the Irish politician and orator Henry Grattan), succeeded in passing a series of acts that increased Ireland’s legislative and judicial independence. The onset of the French Revolution in 1789 and then an uprising – ultimately abortive but temporarily threatening – within Ireland in 1798, led the British government to fear that the country might escape from its authority altogether. Accordingly the decision was taken to concentrate all legislative power in Westminster, requiring the abolition of a separate Irish parliament. It took a couple of efforts – and a great deal of bribery – to achieve this result, not least because Ireland’s legislators had to approve the loss of their own authority (the phrase about turkeys voting for Christmas comes to mind). The Act of Union, as it was called, initially failed to win approval in the Irish House of Commons in January 1799, but a year (and a number of further bribes) later, the deed was done and the Irish Houses of Parliament ceased, of its own volition, to exist. In his Autobiographical Sketches, Thomas de Quincy recalled being in the House of Lords when it met for the last time, and he observed that when the order of abolition was announced, ‘no audible expression, no buzz nor murmur, nor susurrus even, testified the feelings which, doubtless lay rankling in many bosoms.; They had surrendered their power, he thought, ‘with nothing worth the name of a struggle, and no reward worth the name of an indemnification.’ In the aftermath of this act, an alternative use needed to be found for the splendid building on College Green, and in 1803 it was sold by the government to the Bank of Ireland for £40,000, on the understanding that changes would be made to the interior so that it could not revert to its former purpose. This work was undertaken sympathetically by architect Francis Johnston but while the old House of Commons was broken up, the House of Lords survived, for a long time being used as the bank’s board room. Today it is open to the public during weekday mornings and offers a glimpse into how and where Ireland’s parliament operated in the decades before voting itself out of existence. 

Where Time Stands Still



When Joshua MacGeough died in 1817, he left Drumsill House, County Armagh to his younger son Walter, but with the provision that his three daughters took precedence in occupying the property until they either married, died or moved elsewhere. In the event, none of the trio married (and the last of them lived until 1861), so Walter, who would change his surname to MacGeough Bond, decided to build a new residence for himself on land owned by the family elsewhere in the county. In 1819, he commissioned designs for a house from siblings John and Arthur Williamson; they were related by marriage to Francis Johnston and John had also worked for a time in Johnston’s office as a drawing clerk. Nevertheless, the house the brothers produced shows little of Johnston’s influence. Faced in Caledon sandstone, The Argory is long and low, a two-storey, seven bay building, the east front almost entirely plain except for a porch added a few years after the main building had been completed. The west-facing facade is more elaborate, with a central, two-stepped breakfront, the upper portion of which has a horned pediment, the lower distinguished by fluted Doric columns supporting an entablature. Below this a wide elliptical arch has a lion’s head serving as the keystone, its extended tongue taking the form of an acanthus leaf. The main block of The Argory had barely been completed in 1824 before work started on a service wing on the building’s north side (the house has no basement). Behind this wing are a series of enclosed yards. 






The interiors of The Argory, County Armagh appear to have changed little if at all over the past century or more, retaining much of their late-19th century decoration and furnishings: it is as though time has stood still. In standard tripartite fashion, on either side of the entrance hall lie the drawing  and dining rooms, both of which have elaborate overdoors added in the 1850s to the designs of Thomas Turner, those in the latter room featuring scallop shells filled with fruit. Similarly, both rooms have splendid white marble chimneypieces with carved centre panels, that in the drawing room depicting the Death of Cleopatra, while in the dining room Ceres can be seen reclining with her Horn of Plenty. To the rear of the house, what had originally been a morning room was subsequently converted into an inner hall, with a massive chimneypiece of black marble and, above the door leading to the front of the building, a plaster frieze depicting a battle between warriors and Amazons, its design derived from that found below the entablature on the Temple of Athena Nike in Athens. 






The bow-ended entrance hall of The Argory, County Armagh is dominated by a  cantilevered Portland stone staircase that snakes up to the first floor with brass balusters and mahogany handrail. The walls here are painted to imitate sheets of Siena marble while at the foot of the stairs is the original cast-iron stove of Greek pedestal design, topped by a copy of the Warwick Vase and installed in the house in the early 1820s. A wide landing on the first-floor accommodates a large cabinet organ, initially commissioned in 1822 from James Davis but following the latter’s retirement, the work passed to James Chapman Bishop who completed the instrument in 1824; it was thereafter played to accompany morning and evening prayers for the household. Although part of the original furnishings of The Argory, the organ’s dimensions meant cutting into the vaulted ceiling to accommodate it in this location. On either side of the landing, long corridors lead to a succession of bedrooms which, as elsewhere in the building, are still furnished in the style of the late 19th century. The Argory continued to be owned by the MacGeough Bond family until 1979 when it was presented to the National Trust. Last weekend, the trust celebrated the 200th anniversary of the house’s completion with a variety of events on the property.


Period Piece


Back in 2010, while reviewing a biography of Derek Hill, the Irish Aesthete managed to affront a number of people by suggesting the artist’s reputation was less substantial than either he or his admirers might have wished. Indeed, some 24 years after his death, the question is likely to be asked in some circles: Derek who? Born in Southampton in 1916, after leaving school in 1933 Hill originally studied theatre design in Munich, before travelling eastwards through Russia, eventually visiting China and Japan. Returning to England, he took a job as costume designer at Sadlers Wells Theatre but then, encouraged by the couturier Edward Molyneux, he took up painting in a serious fashion. During the Second World War, he worked on a farm as a conscientious objector but still found time to paint and in 1943 had a one-man exhibition in London. In the aftermath of war, he spent a great deal of time in Italy, often staying with art historian Bernard Berenson at his villa I Tatti outside Florence. And he continued to paint, specialising in the genres of landscape and portraiture. Hill demonstrated a distinct aptitude for the former, especially when working on a small scale – in larger pictures he seemed to lose his way – and when presented with the kind of rugged prospect found in the north-west of Ireland, where he spent more and more time. The influence of Corot was always evident in this work, aligned with the beneficial impact of Cezanne. His portraits are more problematic, veering between acute character study and superficial likeness. Some of the finest are little more than preparatory studies; he could overwork a portrait and thereby mislay the sitter’s personality. But in their enormous number these pictures offer an insight into the scope of his social life, which took in everyone from Irish farmers to English grandees. That he had a weakness for aristocracy and royalty cannot be denied (he loved to go on painting holidays with Prince – now King – Charles); it was another aspect of his essentially old-fashioned persona. There is a well-known anecdote of Hill once being decried as a snob, to which he supposedly responded: “How amazing. I was only talking with the Queen Mother a few days ago, and she said just the same thing.” There were two drawbacks to his maintaining a busy social life, flitting from one grand house to the next: it made him appear trivial in the eyes of many people and it took him away from his work. Although he spent periods entirely focused on his work, and quoted Degas’ remark that “if the artist wishes to be serious . . . he must once more sink himself into solitude”, he was unable to apply this policy with sufficient rigour.






Derek Hill first came to Ireland in the late 1940s, invited here by the wealthy  Philadelphia-born socialite and art collector Henry McIllhenny who in 1938 had bought Glenveagh Castle, County Donegal, an estate some 15 miles south-west of where his forebears had lived until emigrating to the United States the previous century; at the time of their meeting, McIllhenny was working as Resident Art Historian at the American Academy in Rome. The two men thereafter remained lifelong ‘frenemies’ (to use a wonderful neologism) and in due course also neighbours because in 1953 Hill bought an old rectory, St Columb’s, just a few miles south of Glenveagh. Five years later, he visited Tory, a small island off the north coast of Donegal, where he rented a hut and spent time each summer painting for himself and also encouraging members of the local fishing community to do likewise, thereby creating a school of naïve painting, known as the Tory Island Painters, the best-known of whom was James Dixon. In 1982 Hill donated St Columb’s and its contents to the Irish State (McIllhenny had done likewise with Glenveagh Castle and gardens three years earlier) and thereafter lived in a small cottage nearby although he spent more time than hitherto in England. He died in London in 2000. 






St Columb’s dates from 1828 when, according to Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837) it was constructed thanks to a gift of £400 and a loan of £380 from the Board of First Fruits; the surrounding glebe land ran to 25 acres. It remained in use as a Church of Ireland rectory until the death of the second resident clergyman, the Rev Henry Maturin in 1880, after which the building was leased to tenants before being sold. In 1898 it opened as St Columb’s Hotel, and continued to be used for this purpose until being bought by Derek Hill in 1953, the majority of guests over the intervening period coming to this part of the country either for fishing or shooting. Of two storeys and three bays, the house retains much of its original appearance, although a large and elaborate cast-iron single storey veranda to the rear seemingly was brought here from somewhere else. Inside, it has a typical tripartite design, with reception rooms on either side of a narrow entrance hall, that to the right presumably serving as a small study since the staircase immediately behind takes up considerable space. The decoration throughout is as it was when St Columb’s was occupied by Derek Hill and displays a fondness for Victoriana and William Morris papers, for needlepoint cushions and Staffordshire figures. The house is now a period piece, preserved as though its former owner had just stepped out for air, and deservedly ought to be kept as such even if, rather like Hill’s paintings, this will not be to everyone’s taste. It is open to the public for tours during the summer months, while, the adjacent yard buildings have been converted into a gallery space which hosts temporary exhibitions each year.

For more information about the house and gallery, see Glebe House and Gallery | Explore a world-class collection of art (glebegallery.ie)