Tag Archives: Interior Decoration

Behind a Modest Facade


Like many 18th century residential buildings in central Dublin, the facade of Ely House is extremely plain, of red brick with only the pedimented stone fan- and side-lit doorcase offering some interest. Of four storeys-over-basement, the building had been bought in 1770 by Henry Loftus from Dublin physician and property developer Gustavus Hume. The previous year, following the death of his unmarried nephew, the hitherto somewhat impoverished Loftus had inherited a substantial estate and the title Viscount Loftus: the following year he would be created Earl of Ely. Known for his social pretensions, he would be mocked as ‘Count Loftonzo’ in the satirical History of Barataria published in the Freeman’s Journal in Spring 1771. The work he commissioned at Rathfarnham Castle, County Dublin has already been discussed here (see A Whiter Shade of Pale « The Irish Aesthete and Flying High « The Irish Aesthete). Although Loftus already owned a house in the capital on Cavendish Row, following his inheritance evidently he felt the need to cross the river Liffey and occupy a new property, hence the purchase of Ely House. Unusual because of its size, the building was originally of six bays, a seventh being acquired on the left-hand (north) side in the 19th century around the time the house was divided into two properties: today it is near-impossible to photograph the entire exterior of the house without being assaulted by traffic: hence the somewhat truncated image here. When first occupied, the attic floor seemingly contained a private, sixty-seat theatre with space for an orchestra. The Freeman’s Journal of 19th April 1785 reports on the performance of both a tragedy (‘The Distressed Mother’) and a comedy (‘All the World’s a Stage’), both acted by friends of the earl’s second and much-younger wife, Anne Bonfoy. Sadly, nothing of this theatre now survives. But other parts of the remarkable interior remain to be explored. 





The rear of Ely House’s groundfloor is given over to the double-height stair hall, the steps of which are of Portland Stone, while the panelled balustrade is made of wrought iron and carved gilt-wood. At the base can be seen a life-size figure of Hercules, resting from his Labours. The latter are then depicted as one ascends the staircase, although not in the correct narrative order: shown here is the eagle killed with an arrow by the mythical hero. The inspiration for this work is believed to have been a substantially larger staircase in the Palace of Charles of Lorraine in Brussels – now a museum – created by the Flemish sculptor Laurent Delvaux in 1769. The stuccodore Barthelemy Cremillion, who had been employed in Ireland in the second half of the 1750s, was responsible for the Brussels palace plasterwork and is therefore thought to have been behind the similar scheme in Ely House since by this date he had returned to Dublin. On the other hand, Professor Christine Casey has pointed out that the stoneyard of sculptor John van Nost adjoined Lord Ely’s property and that both he and Cremillion had worked at the same time on the decoration of the city’s Lying-in Hospital (otherwise known as the Rotunda Hospital), so he may also have been involved here. 




Many of the reception rooms in Ely House, Dublin, are rather plain, although it retains some splendid chimneypieces again thought to have been the work of John van Nost. One of the ground floor reception rooms features a series of figurative ovals and roundels depicting a variety of scenes and surrounded by pendants and swirls that look like strings of pearls. It used to be judged that this plasterwork was part of the house’s 18th century decoration but more recently the scheme is considered to date from the late 19th/early 20th century when the building was occupied by the wealthy surgeon and collector Sir Thornley Stoker (incidentally, the elder brother of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula): he lived here from 1890 to 1911 and filled the building with his valuable collection of art and furniture, alas all auctioned before his death in 1912. The room directly above certainly suggests a relatively recent vintage, the figures here looking as though they had stepped out of the work of an Edwardian illustrator like Kate Greenaway. Since 1923, Ely House has been owned by the Knights of St Columbanus, an Irish Roman Catholic society which uses the building as its national headquarters. 

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On the Hill of the Fairies


In 1897 Edith Leeson Marshall married Sir Home Gordon, 12th (and last) baronet of Embo. A passionate cricketer, Sir Home wrote extensively on the sport although he never seems to have been an outstanding player. His wife Edith, descended from the first Earl of Milltown, was the youngest child of Richard and Rebecca Leeson Marshall, an evangelical Christian couple. Her father had inherited from his uncle an estate in County Kerry called Callinafercy and there built a comfortable, unpretentious villa for his family, the place later described by his daughter as ‘a house without a redeeming feature.’ But he died when Edith was only aged seven and her widowed mother moved about mainland Europe before settling in Richmond, outside London. In her entertaining memoir, The Winds of Time (1934), Edith Gordon describes how, at the time of her marriage both she and her new husband were convinced he could look forward to a future as a successful novelist, ‘but when, after some months of strenuous effort in the literary and journalistic worlds, he had only succeeded in obtaining the editorship of Banjo World at three guineas a month, my confidence began to wane…’ Meanwhile, Lady Gordon began to write, albeit under a pseudonym, for various publications including Ladies’ Field, then edited by the notorious Lady Colin Campbell. When she published a collection of essays under her own name in 1908, this was ‘received with astonishment by certain of my friends and acquaintances. “How clever of you to be able to write,” they exclaimed in terms of surprise mingled with awe.’ Through her writing, Lady Gordon also came to know Edward Hudson, founder of Country Life, and often accompanied him on expeditions, thereby getting to visit many country houses and meeting the likes of Edwin Lutyens, Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, with whom she shared an Irish background. All of these individuals would influence her when she came to commission a house for herself in County Kerry. What inspired her to embark on such an enterprise? Lady Gordon explained that by 1913, she had grown tired of life in London and its seemingly endless society crazes. ‘I felt I must get away from everybody and everything if I were not to become like the lady in the Divorce Court who, on being reprimanded by the judge for the frequency with which she committed adultery, flippantly remarked, “Well, what else can you do between tea and dinner”?’ And so, having inherited some money, she bought a parcel of land in County Kerry.





A rare example of an Arts and Crafts house in Ireland, Ard na Sidhe (meaning ‘Hill of the Fairies’) sits above Caragh Lake to the immediate west and ‘surrounded by mountains varying in colour from deepest purple to distant misty blue.’ Initially a wooden house was constructed on the site, but this proved problematic. In The Winds of Time, Lady Gordon claimed ‘I may as well remark that, having designed all the important parts of the house myself, such as the drawing room and the veranda, the bay-windows and my own bedroom, I had left such uninteresting details as the chimneys and stairs to the contractor.’ The latter individual she then blamed for such problems as the entrance hall being in the wrong place, claiming that when this was pointed out to him, ‘he drew himself up, and with an ingratiating smile, remarked that in view of the great success of the rest of the house I must forgive him. “It is really the nicest little house I ever built,’ he added with pride, “and the first in which I’ve been able to carry out all my own ideas”.’ In due course and inevitably, the wooden building had to be replaced with something more substantial, this one designed by the English-born Percy Richard Morley Horder, who in 1915 exhibited a drawing for the house at the Royal Academy in London. Although little remembered today, Horder enjoyed a successful career during his lifetime (he died in 1944). His early work tended to be in the Arts and Crafts style, while in the interwar period he became known for his Neo-Georgian work. He designed, or remodelled, a large number of country houses in England as well as churches (he was the son of a Congregationalist minister), university buildings in Cambridge and Oxford, as well as a large part of the Nottingham University’s campus. When young, Horder was good looking and could have charm, but he also had a ferocious temper, hence his nickname of ‘Holy Murder.’ His elder daughter thought that ‘he was the most remarkable man I have ever met, the most dedicated, the most charming (when he chose to be) and the most awful.’ Meanwhile, in an account of his life by Clyde Binfield published in 1988, it was recalled that Horder had a habit of treating his clients with disdain. ‘It was how most professionals might sometimes wish to treat their clients, if they dared. Horder’s way became legendary. He would shout at them, his voice sounding through the floor. “You come here and hector and bully me”, he shouted as one client retreated quietly from the room.’ Nevertheless, he seems to have enjoyed a good relationship with Lady Gordon who admitted that she had chosen him ‘out of a number of competitors, chiefly for his romantic appearance, which I felt somehow would be reflected in his designs and work. She also acknowledged not being the easiest of clients and given to regular changes of mind: ‘No architect, I am sure, ever had so much to contend with, and none ever emerged more amiably out of the ordeal, not even uttering a protest when submitting a drawing which, I saw one day, to my horror, was numbered “103”.’ Incidentally, the original wooden house was taken down and re-erected at the nearby town of Killorglin where it served as a Sinn Fein club until burnt out by the Black and Tans. 





Although reminiscent in design of an English manor house, Ard na Sidhe is built of local materials including sandstone from Glenbeigh, the only exception being Westmorland roof slates. Its exterior composed of a series of steep gables and mullioned windows, the building is surrounded by a sequence of gardens originally laid out by Lady Gordon, surrounded by low stone walls, all meandering down to the lake shoreline. Again, in her memoir, she lays claim for having been responsible for the gardens’ design, after an unnamed ‘lady gardener’, employed to help with laying out the site, revealed ‘that she knew even less about it than I did.’ Lady Gordon battled on alone but much enjoying the experience: ‘I must candidly say that I did not feel in the least that my garden was a “school of peace.” On the contrary, I should describe it as a perennial nightmare…on the other hand, my garden never bored me. It worried me by day, and kept me awake by night; it made me swear and it made me weep; and it would have taken very little more to make me scream.’ Unlike other houses in this part of the country, Ard na Sidhe survived both the War of Independence and the Civil War, although raided on at least seven occasions by troops belonging to various factions, and having items – including a motor car – stolen. But in the aftermath, separated (and eventually divorced) from her husband and with a diminished income, Lady Gordon found herself obliged to sell the property. ‘Parting with it,’ she wrote, ‘took an ever-increasing financial strain off my mind, but it left a hole in my heart which has never been filled…’ The house then passed through a number of hands before being acquired by the family of its present owners who in 1960 opened the place as a small hotel. More recently, Ard na Sidhe benefitted from a superlative restoration by architectural firm Howley Hayes Cooley, during which the original steel framed leaded casement windows were repaired and the stone exterior repointed in lime, while the interior underwent a replanning of the public areas and bedrooms. Many features which had been lost over intervening decades and, just as importantly, Ard na Sidhe’s original character, were brought back, along with panelled walls, stone chimneypieces, oak and stone flooring and oak doors. Today Ard na Sidhe looks and feels as though its original chatelaine still lived on the premises. 


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Behind the Scenes


Owing to the popularity of films and television series, perhaps most notably ‘Downton Abbey’, recent years have seen an increased interest in and awareness of life in what used to be called ‘below stairs.’ Indeed, most country houses open to the public report that visitors today are often far more engaged by what were once the servants’ quarters than they are in the building’s main reception rooms, no matter how splendidly decorated and furnished the latter may be. It is as though the audience at a theatre now prefers to spend time examining what takes place behind the scenes rather than watch the action on stage. Which is not to disparage either that interest or indeed the lives of those who were once employed in the Irish ‘Big House,’ the latter being deservedly the subject of increased scrutiny among historians.
In this country, although the work of servants was not hugely different from that of their equivalents elsewhere, it did have some distinctive characteristics. To begin with, there were often more of them than might be the case in other European countries, including our nearest neighbour. When Arthur Young toured Ireland in the second half of the 1770s, he noted that servants’ wages in Ireland were on average some thirty per cent cheaper than in England (and that there was no servants’ tax here). This may at least in part explain why most country house owners employed more of them. However, according to Young, the reason there were more servants was due ‘not only to the general laziness, but also to the number of attendants everyone of a higher class will have; this is common in great families in England, but in Ireland a man of five hundred a year feels it.’ In other words, in order to demonstrate your lofty status, you employed a lot of servants, even if there was little for them to do. When Sir James Caldwell visited the Earl of Belvedere in County Westmeath in 1773, he and two other gentlemen were not only entertained to a lavish dinner by their host but also waited upon by four valets de chambre and seven or eight footmen. ‘If the Lord-Lieutenant had dined there,’ Sir James thought, ‘there could not have been a more elegant entertainment.’
Almost forty years earlier, Samuel Madden in his Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland also commented on the large number of servants found in Irish country establishments. ‘We keep many of them in our houses,’ he wrote, ‘as we do our plate on our sideboards, more for show than for use, and rather to let people see that we have them than that we have any occasion for them.’ (Madden also thought that servants during this period, ‘are so excessively paid for being so useless and debauched, and at the same time such compleat masters of their business, that they cheat us, when they think fit, and obey us only when they judge it reasonable.’ One suspects that the servants in question might have had a different opinion of the matter). 





In Two Centuries of Life in Down (1920), John Stevenson cites an account book kept between 1781 and 1797 by Anne Savage of Portaferry House, in which the wages of various servants are listed as follows:
Maids (duties unstated): £3 to £3, 8sh and 3d per annum
Ladies’ maids: £4, 1sh and 10d to £8 per annum
House Maids: £4 to £5 per annum
Kitchen maid: £3 per annum
Man Cook:: £12 per annum
Butler: £13, 13sh per annum
Footman: £9, 20sh per annum
Postilion (‘to keep himself in shirts, shoes and stockings’): £3, 8sh and 3d per annum
2nd Postilion (‘to keep himself in Boots, Britches and Linen’): £5, 13sh and 9d per annum
Coachman: £11, 7sh and 6d
Groom: £8
Stevenson also quotes some of Mrs Savage’s comments about the servants which could, on occasion, be quite savage. Of one Elizabeth Keley, she wrote that after two years of service, she was discharged ‘by her own desire. She is sober, Honest, Quiet but not a very good housemaid.’ Mary Walker, meanwhile, left employment at Portaferry House after a year, again of her own volition, Mrs Savage observing ‘She is a very good Servant and very honest. Neither sober nor quiet. I willingly part with her.’ Six months later, Mary Walker returned to the same position, but after 18 months again left, her former employer describing her as ‘a very good servant’ but ‘she drinks and is very bad tempered in that situation.’ Other female servants received even worse reviews from their erstwhile mistress, one being dismissed as good only when it pleased her, although ‘neither sober nor quiet’ while another, although sober and honest was also judged ‘Dirty, Disorderly and pert.’ Again, it would be interesting to know what these women thought of Mrs Savage as an employer. 





Although architects’ plans often indicate accommodation for servants in an Irish country house, this was not always carried through, and especially in the 17th and earlier part of the 18th centuries, at least some employees were left to sleep where they could – hugger-mugger on pallets in the kitchen, or, if they were personal maids and the like, in their master or mistress’s dressing room. Sometimes they would find a bed in what was termed the ‘barrack room’, a large dormitory space usually on the top floor of the building; these could also be employed for guests if a large number of single gentlemen came to stay for a few days. The one consistent feature was that male and female servants were required to sleep in different rooms or areas.
Service in an Irish country house differed from that elsewhere in a number of respects. In Country and Town in Ireland under the Georges (1940), Constantia Maxwell pointed out that two categories of servants were peculiar to here: the gossoon and the ‘running footman.’ As she explained, the gossoon (from the French garçon) was a young boy, effectively a slave to the cook and the butler; ‘that is to say that he did the drudgery of the house.’ Barefoot, gossoons were frequently sent on messages elsewhere and were known to cover extraordinary distances – up to fifty miles – in one day. Similarly running footmen took messages or letters to other parts of the surrounding country, carrying a long pole which they used for jumping over bogs, hedges and ditches. They might also be sent ahead, when the house owner was travelling, to find and prepare lodgings in an inn, ‘for they were chosen for their reliability as well as their strength.’
Servants’ tunnels were another common characteristic of Irish country houses, only occasionally encountered elsewhere. These long covered passageways were designed to lead from one part of the property to another without those using them being seen by the owners of the house: provisions, fuel and so forth could thus be moved around the building almost invisibly. The example shown here is typical of such tunnels, long and straight, large enough if necessary to accommodate a donkey and cart, with a vaulted roof and usually – but not always – intermittent openings permitting natural light to enter the space. Today, the servants’ tunnel is largely redundant, as indeed are most of the other spaces which were once the domain of country house staff. In this instance, even if there is still life on the main stage, today little takes place behind the scenes. 


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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

 

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)

 

Addio del Passato



Last Monday, the Presidents of Ireland and Italy jointly inaugurated a new public park in Lucan, County Dublin, the space henceforth to be known as Parco Italia. The reason for this somewhat unusual name? Since 1942 Lucan House, which stands at the centre of the 30-acre park, has been the official residence of successive Italian ambassadors to this country. The building here has, like so often, a long and complex history but in its present form was commissioned in the early 1770s by the estate’s then-owner Agmondisham Vesey who, although he consulted several eminent architects, played an active role in the eventual design. Vesey’s house replaced an earlier one, probably dating back to the Middle Ages but much altered over the centuries. A painting by Thomas Roberts produced shortly before its demolition shows what appears to be a late-mediaeval tower house with a fortified manor house with castellated roofline to one side. Vesey’s wife Elizabeth, a noted bluestocking (and close friend of Elizabeth Montague) lamented the destruction of the older building, ‘with its niches and thousand other Gothic beauties,’ but her husband was determined to start afresh. To do this, he not only had to overcome his spouse’s opposition but also the original house’s associations with noted Irish patriot Patrick Sarsfield, first Earl of Lucan. His forebear, Sir William Sarsfield, had acquired the Lucan estate in 1566 and although temporarily dispossessed during the Confederate Wars, several generations of the family lived there until the marriage in 1696 of heiress Catherine Sarsfield (a niece of Patrick Sarsfield) to Agmondisham Vesey, father of the man responsible for building Lucan House. 





As mentioned above, Agmondisham Vesey, displayed a keen interest in architecture despite his involvement in many other activities: a Member of the Irish Parliament, he was also a Privy Councillor and Accountant and Controller General of Ireland. Like his wife Elizabeth he liked to keep abreast of cultural developments: in 1773, during the period that work was underway on the new house, he was elected to the ‘Club’, the informal dining and conversational group established by Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds 10 years earlier. Johnson and James Boswell granted him the notional title of ‘Professor of Architecture,’ and the latter wrote that Vesey had ‘left a good specimen of his knowledge and taste in that art by an elegant house built on a plan of his own at Lucan.’ Boswell exaggerated his friend’s role in the matter because while Vesey undoubtedly had a hand in Lucan House’s appearance, so did a number of architects, not least Sir William Chambers who in 1773 sent him now-lost ‘Designs for a Villa.’ It is thought that the facade of the building was based on this work, not least because in March 1774, Vesey wrote to Chambers, ‘I am much more intent in finishing the South front of your Plan at Lucan this summer.’ The aforementioned facade is of seven bays and two storeys over basement except for the breakfront three centre bays which feature an additional attic storey beneath a pediment (despite Vesey reminding Chambers ‘You have taught us to think pediments but common architecture). This central section is faced in granite ashlar with four half-engaged giant Ionic columns above a rusticated ground floor. Originally at that level the two bays on either side were given rusticated render, as can be seen in an engraving of the house produced by Thomas Milton in 1783, but this was removed at some later date. Lucan House’s design looks to have been the inspiration for Charleville, County Wicklow, designed by Whitmore Davis in 1797, although the facade of that building is entirely faced in ashlar and runs to nine bays. Meanwhile, at Lucan, the house forms a rectangular block, other than a three-bay bow to the rear that, as with the facade, rises three storeys over basement. 





If Sir William Chambers was involved in designing the exterior of Lucan House, James Wyatt, together with his Irish representative Thomas Penrose, can claim much credit for the building’s interiors, with Michael Stapleton responsible for much of the plasterwork found on many of the walls and ceilings in the ground floor, as well as the main staircase and first-floor lobby. Lucan House has some of the finest examples of neo-classical decoration in Ireland, beginning with the entrance hall, to the rear of which a screen of columns and pilasters painted to imitate Siena marble, provide access to the principal reception rooms. That to the immediate left here, now called the Wedgewood Room but originally the breakfast room, is a perfect square, its walls rising to a gently domed ceiling at the centre of which is a medallion depicting a warrior kneeling before Minerva accompanied by her maidens. Around the room, floral drops surround panels containing what appear to be grisaille paintings: in fact, these are in fact prints overpainted at some date when age had caused them to fade. To the rear is the drawing room, although this was intended to be the dining room. Its walls were left undecorated (and today covered in paper) but again the ceiling has been covered in plasterwork centred on another medallion, this one, somewhat unusually, featuring the Christ child and infant John the Baptist together with a lamb. The rear of the house is taken up by what is now the dining room but was originally intended to be the drawing room. The ceiling decoration here is simpler than that in the previous rooms, but the walls are decorated with plaster girandoles, their design found among those created by Michael Stapleton. Oval in shape, the bow in the window is echoed by a similarly curved wall centred on a door leading back into the entrance hall. This arrangement of the two rooms  – hall with screen of columns to the rear and central door opening into an oval room – is found in Castle Coole, County Fermanagh designed in the early 1790s by James Wyatt.
Agmondisham Vesey died in 1785 and having no children, left the estate to his nephew Colonel George Vesey. The latter’s only child, Elizabeth Vesey, married Sir Nicholas Colthurst and their descendants lived at Lucan House until the property and its contents were sold in September 1925 by Captain Richard Colthurst (later eighth baronet), after which it was occupied by Charles Hugh O’Conor and then his son-in-law William Teeling. In 1942 the building and surrounding gardens were rented by the Italian government and then bought 12 years later, to serve as a residence for its ambassador. It continued to serve the same purpose until this month, at the end of which the present ambassador leaves his position and the property passes into the hands of a new owner, the local authority, South Dublin County Council. What happens to both house and grounds in the future remains to be seen. 



For anyone wondering, the bronze buffaloes seen in the grounds and fibreglass horse in the entrance hall, all by contemporary Italian artist Davide Rivalta and placed in their present positions last year, are due to remain on site. 

Another Light Hand


No.36 Westland Row, Dublin and its exquisite neoclassical plasterwork has featured here before (see A Light Hand « The Irish Aesthete) Home for more than 150 years to the Royal Irish Academy of Music, the building was originally constructed in 1771 as a private house but in the 19th century, like so many others, became used for commercial purposes. Somehow, its interiors remained intact, not least one of the first-floor reception rooms, the ceiling of which has an elaborate decorative scheme with a classical scene painted by an unknown hand at its centre. Meanwhile, on either side of the chimney-breast are substantial fluted niches, with various classical figures inside ovals. As mentioned before, the stuccowork here has been tentatively attributed by Conor Lucey to Michael Stapleton, drawing on designs made by Thomas Penrose. The latter acted as agent for the English architect James Wyatt who during this period had many clients in Ireland.

Then and Now

 

In the middle of the 16th century, one Hans Fock moved from the north German city of Lübeck to Estonia, which was then coming under the control of Sweden. Around 100 years later, Queen Christina, shortly before her abdication, elevated Fock’s descendants to the Swedish peerage. After Sweden’s decisive defeat by Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 and the subsequent annexation of Estonia to Russian rule, Henrik Johann Fock moved first to Malmö and then to other parts of Sweden, where through marriage he came into possession of an estate. His heir, Jacob Constantin Fock acquired further property, including land at Råbäck in the county of Skaraborg; it is from this place that the family’s title, Baron de Robeck, derives. His son, Johan Henrik Fock, enjoyed a colourful career, including fighting against the British army during the American War of Independence, before moving to England where in March 1789 he married Anne Fitz-Patrick, heiress to a Galway landowner: four months after the wedding, by an Act of Parliament Fock was naturalised as a British subject under the name ‘John Henry Fock, called Baron de Robeck.’ The couple’s son, John Michael Henry Fock, after serving under General Sir John Moore in the Peninsula Wars, settled in Ireland where in 1820 he married the Hon Margaret Lawless, daughter of Valentine Lawless, second Baron Cloncurry. Famously, her parents had divorced after Lord Cloncurry had successfully sued Sir John Bennett Piers for criminal conversation with his wife. Alas, it proved to be a case of ‘like mother, like daughter’ and in 1828 the de Robecks were divorced after the baroness was found to be having an affair with Lord Sussex Lennox, a younger son of the fourth Duke of Richmond (the couple subsequently went on to marry and have three children). Baron de Robeck married a second time and in due course acquired a house in Dublin’s Merrion Square which at some date in the early 1850s he elaborately redecorated. 






Like its neighbours, 40 Merrion Square dates from the late 18th century and has a three-bay plain brick facade. Its interior was presumably decorated in similar style to those on either side, with neoclassical plasterwork and white marble chimneypieces. However, as mentioned already, the house underwent something of a transformation in the mid-19th century when occupied by the third Baron de Robeck. Here the two first-floor reception rooms were redecorated in elaborate Louis Quinze style, the walls covered with thin panels filled with pendants, urns, leaves, ribbons and musical instruments. Some of the panels were also filled with mirrored glass while pedimented roundels were inserted over the doors and, in the rear room, the central oval of the ceiling painted with a trompe-l’œil sky. The architect responsible for this scheme is unknown, although Christine Casey has suggested the Belfast firm of Lanyon, Lynn & Lanyon since soon afterwards it was commissioned by the fourth baron to design a new country house, Gowran Grange in County Kildare. He may have been inspired to do so by the unfortunate death of his father, the man who had undertaken the refurbishment of 40 Merrion Square. Aside from his residence in Dublin, the third baron also rented Leixlip Castle a few miles outside the city. While staying there in October 1856, he disappeared, his body only being found 11 days later; it would appear the baron, who had gone down to the edge of the river Liffey below the castle to see the Salmon Leap, had slipped and drowned. 






In the period after the third baron’s death, 40 Merrion Square served various purposes. During the First World War, it housed the Irish War Hospital Supply Depot, and at the time of the Easter Rising in 1916, it was transformed by Dr Ella Webb into an emergency field hospital capable of treating 50 patients. Later in the last century, the house’s neighbour, 39 Merrion Square, became the British Embassy until burned by rioters in the aftermath of Derry’s Bloody Sunday in January 1972. By that date, the state-owned Electricity Supply Board already owned 40-43 Merrion Square and the same body subsequently acquired and restored No.39. Various alterations were made to the buildings, not least openings made at different levels, allowing internal movement from one house to the next. A lift shaft was inserted to the rear of No.41 and the party walls between rear gardens largely demolished, with much of the ground covered in frankly prosaic buildings and sub-stations. In 2019 the ESB offered the quintet for sale as a single lot, bought two years later by a development company which has since undertaken a scrupulous restoration of the whole property, so that it now provides flexible workspaces for a variety of businesses. Today’s pictures show the first floor rooms of 40 Merrion Square before and after this recent refurbishment. 

Tremendous Swagger



Francis Andrews was born in Derry 1718. The official Trinity College Dublin website describes his father as being a man ‘of independent means’, but the Dictionary of Irish Biography notes that contemporary gossip proposed Andrews senior had been imprisoned for debt. In any case, the parent died when his son was aged only two, after which the widow Andrews married a Mr Tomkins who took such good care of the boy, that the latter was able to attend Trinity College Dublin, graduating in 1737 and elected a Fellow three years later. He then read law at the Middle Temple in London and was called to the Irish Bar in 1746. Andrews was a noted bon viveur and his legal practice does not appear to have interfered with a very busy social life, at one time involving travel to Italy on a Grand Tour. Nevertheless, Andrews did possess scholarship, impressing professors in Padua with his knowledge of Latin and classical authors. The most momentous change in his circumstances occurred in 1758. He happened to be in London when it was announced that the Provost of Trinity College Dublin, Richard Baldwin, had died. A month later, Andrews was appointed by George II to the position, the first layman to hold the post since 1626. His close friendship with John Russell, Duke of Bedford and Richard Rigby, then respectively Lord Lieutenant and chief secretary of Ireland, are believed to have played a major role in securing him the Provostship as did – according to the same aforementioned gossip – lobbying by the popular actress Peg Woffington. In 1759 he was elected to the Irish House of Commons for the first time and to the Irish privy council two years later. Thereafter, despite – or perhaps thanks to – his responsibilities in the college, he served on innumerable committees and boards, as well as maintaining an already hectic social round. Not surprisingly, in 1774 he was obliged to travel abroad for the sake of his health, but died on his way back to Ireland. During his time as Provost, Andrews was responsible for establishing a number of new professorships, as well as a chair in music (its first incumbent was Garrett Wesley, first Earl of Mornington and father of the Duke of Wellington). He also oversaw much building work within the college, not least the construction of a residence for himself and his successors, the Provost’s House. 





Unquestionably the most splendid private residence remaining in Ireland’s capital, Number 1 Grafton Street is otherwise known as the Provost’s House. The building was commissioned by Francis Andrews in 1759, in other words almost immediately after he had taken up his new post; previous provosts had occupied lodgings in the college quadrangle, so this was something of a departure, not least because the house with its substantial forecourt closed off from the street by a high stone wall, looks more like a nobleman’s palace than an academic’s residence.  The splendour of the place was immediately and widely recognised. In September 1764, a London newspaper, the St James’s Chronicle, reported ‘The King of France has not so splendid a palace in all his Dominions as that the University [of Dublin] has lately erected for its Provost.’ The building is thought to have been designed by Dublin architect John Smyth, although as is well known the facade is a shameless copy of the garden front of General Wade’s London residence, designed by Lord Burlington in 1725 (and demolished in the 1930s). That design was, in turn, taken from one of Andrea Palladio’s drawings owned by Burlington. Smyth had form here: St Thomas’s church on Marlborough Street, Dublin which he designed around the same time was directly modelled on Palladio’s church of the Rendentore in Venice (the church was destroyed in 1922 during the Civil War). As for the Provost’s House, even at the time its indebtedness was noted; in 1761 George Montagu, then living in Dublin while his cousin the Earl of Halifax was Lord Lieutenant, wrote to Horace Walpole, ‘The provost’s house of the university is just finished after the plan of General Wade’s, but half of the proportions and symmetry were lost at sea in coming over.’ The only difference between the earlier buildingsand this one is that the Provost’s House is flanked by long, low pedimented single-storey wings.





The fine vaulted entrance hall of the Provost’s House in Trinity College Dublin is divided into two sections by a pair of substantial arches, behind which lie two ground floor reception rooms and a pair of staircases. The walls here are rusticated in wood, painted to imitate stone, that material used for the flagged floor and the chimney piece on the south wall. To the rear on the ground floor, the drawing room is surprisingly modest but the neighbouring three-bay dining room, in keeping with Francis Andrews’ fondness for social life, is altogether more substantial and elaborate in its decoration. Here the stuccowork, as elsewhere in the building, was undertaken by siblings Patrick and John Wall, while James Robinson and Richard Cranfield were responsible for the carving. Moving upstairs,  the first-floor saloon is one of the great rooms of 18th century Dublin, only comparable to that in 85 St Stephen’s Green (see The Most Beautiful Room in Ireland? « The Irish Aesthete).. Running the entire length of the building, the saloon is lit by a west-facing central Venetian window flanked by pairs of sash windows. With its deep coved ceiling, the space is divided in three by two Corinthian columnar screens, while elaborately carved chimneypieces can be found on either side of the door giving access to the saloon. At the southern end of the space hangs a portrait of the man responsible for its creation, the aforementioned Francis Andrews, painted by Anton von Maron, presumably when both men were in Rome. Facing him at the other end of the room is a portrait by Thomas Gainsborough of John Russell, Duke of Bedford, Chancellor of the University, 1765-1771 and old friend of Francis Andrews. A room of tremendous swagger, the saloon, like the rest of the Provost’s House, testifies to the assurance of Ireland in the mid-18th century.