Tag Archives: Interior Decoration

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.


A Room Reborn



Over the past few decades, visitors to Russborough, County Wicklow have become familiar with the house’s drawing room being painted with honey-toned walls and plasterwork picked out in white. However, research in recent years has shown that this scheme only dates from the mid-20th century and that before then the room was decorated in an altogether more florid manner. Surviving photographs from the 19th century, as well as paint analysis, reveals that originally, while the walls were coloured a soft white, their stuccowork was part-gilded and part-coppered, in a fashion unlike anything else found in Ireland or Britain. Commissioned by Joseph Leeson, first Earl of Milltown and designed by Richard Castle, the leading country house architect of the period, Russborough dates from the mid-18th century and many of its contents were collected by Leeson while he undertook two Grand Tours, both including time spent in Rome. There he encountered French artist Claude-Joseph Vernet and from him commissioned a series of eight landscape paintings to hang in the drawing room. These were gradually dispersed so that by the time Sir Alfred Beit bought the property, none remained. In 1968, he bought back four oval pictures and reinstated them in the empty stucco cartouches. More recently, four other landscape paintings, either by Vernet or his pupil Charles Francois Grenier de Lacroix (also known as Vernet Lacroix) were acquired by the Apollo Foundation and lent to Russborough, so that the drawing room, as known to Joseph Leeson, could be recreated. Following many months of work, it opened to the public earlier this week and is a revelation of 18th century decorative taste in Ireland.


All that is Fantastically Eccentric in Architecture


‘It was in the hall of this Castle, then his principal residence, that James, first Duke and twelfth Earl of Ormond, received, as he sat at dinner, on 23d October 1641, intelligence of the great rebellion, in which he so eminently distinguished himself as Commander of the Royal Army. Since that period, none of the Ormond family have resided in Carrick-Castle, which is, however, maintained in good repair, and occupied by a private gentleman, who has evinced excellent taste in the alterations which he has made in the building without impairing the character of its architecture. It stands upon the banks of the river Suir, and near the town of Carrick-on-Suir. This castle was built in the year 1309, by Edmond le Boteler, or Butler, whose son was created Earl of Ormond in 1328. By him it was granted, in 1336, together with its demesnes, to the Franciscan monks of the Abbey of Carrick-on-Suir. But these venerable personages, who probably attached more value to the lands than to the fortress, appear to have permitted it to fall into decay, since we find that, in 1445, Sir Edmund Butler purchased the premises from the Monks, and rebuilt the Castle and Bridge.’
From Picturesque Views of the Antiquities of Ireland, 1830






‘Prior to starting to Waterford, let us not fail to view the fine old castle of the Ormonds, built in 1309, and still remaining in the family. The antique bridge, from the right bank of the river, just above the weir, presents all that is fantastically eccentric in architecture, the ivied house in the centre imparting to it an air of pleasing novelty. The parish chapel is said to have been built by the Ormonds, and the tower attached to the modern building bears proof of high antiquity. We hope tradition speaks “no scandal against Queen Elizabeth,” as the guide points out the grave of Thomas Butler, the putative natural son of her maiden Majesty.’
From The Tourist’s Illustrated Hand-Book for Ireland, 1859






‘I chanced that day to be at Carrick, and I walked to see the old castle. It is beautifully situated in a secluded lawn overhanging the Suir, at a distance of a few hundred yards from the eastern end of the town. I could not ascertain the date of the older, or castellated part of the edifice: the more modern part was erected by Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, in 1565, which date is displayed on the wall of the hall; on which, likewise, there is a rude fresco representing Queen Elizabeth, with the initials E.R. On the opposite wall there is another fresco of the founder, who is said by the tradition of the castle to have found favour as a lover of that princess. The tradition found its way into France, and the family of Lord Galmoye is stated, in a French genealogical work, to descend from her Majesty and her Irish admirer…The curious old mansion founded by “Black Tom Butler” is still habitable. Its front presents a long row of gables in the fashion of Elizabethan manor-houses, with a large Oriel window over the porch. Its large deserted chambers are just as spectral personages might regularly honour with their visits. I accordingly asked if the house was haunted, and was told by the person who showed it, that in the days of the Ormonds, a ghost had been constantly there – a utilitarian ghost, apparently; for he used to officiate as volunteer shoeblack, and to discharge other duties of domestic labour.
The largest apartments are in the upper storey. There is a noble drawing room about sixty feet long, which contains two decorated chimneys. Whatever be the worth of the Galmoye tradition, old “Tom Butler” as the guide familiarly called him, was anxious to record his devotion to Elizabeth; and this he has done by the frequent repetition of her Majesty’s initials and arms in the quaint stucco ornaments of the ceiling.’
From Ireland and her Agitators by W.J. O’Neill, 1867. 

A Complex History


The name of Newcastle, County Longford would seem to indicate that the present house, or an earlier one on or near this site, replaced a more ancient building. The earliest information on the place seems to be from 1680 when the lands of its demesne, formerly part of the O’Farrell territory, are recorded as being purchased by Robert Choppyne (or Choppin) who built here ‘a fayre house and a wooden bridge.’ By this date, he had already become High Sheriff of Longford three years earlier and would go on to represent County Longford in the Irish House of Commons in 1692 before dying a year or two later. The Newcastle property was left to his nephew Anthony Sheppard who continued to acquire more land in the area, but not so fortunate when it came to continuing his line: he and his wife had four sons who died young and one who survived to adulthood, only to predecease his father. And while the estate was left to Sheppard’s daughter Mary, who had married Arthur St. Leger, Viscount Doneraille, she also died without heirs not long after.  So Newcastle passed to Anthony Sheppard’s widowed sister, Frances Harman (her late husband, Sir Wentworth Harman, had died in 1714 when ‘coming in a dark night from Chapel-Izod, his coach overturning, tumbled down a precipice, and he dies in consequence of the wounds and bruises he received’). For many years, the estate was managed by her younger son, the Rev Cutts Harman, who appeared here some months ago with regard to Castlecor (see A Worthy Recipient « The Irish Aesthete). Once again, the direct line failed and so, on the death of the Rev Harman, Castlecor passed to his nephew, Laurence Harman Parsons, on condition that the latter adopt his uncle’s surname: accordingly, he became Laurence Parsons Harman. He would also, in due course, be created Baron Oxmantown, then Viscount Oxmantown and finally first Earl of Rosse in 1806. His only surviving child was a daughter, Frances, who married Robert King, first Viscount Lorton, of Rockingham, County Roscommon. Their younger son, Laurence Harman King-Harman inherited both the Newcastle and Rockingham estates; on his death in 1875 the two were divided, with Newcastle passing to a younger son, Colonel Wentworth King-Harman. The  estate reached its largest extent during this period, running to some 38,616 acres and described in 1900 as ‘a master-piece of smooth and intricate organisation, with walled gardens and glasshouses, its dairy, its laundry, its carpenters, masons and handymen of all estate crafts, the home farm, the gamekeepers and retrievers kennels, its saw-mill and paint shop and deer park for the provision of venison. The place is self-supporting to a much greater degree than most country houses in England.’





The core of Newcastle could date from the late 17th century when Robert Choppyne built his ‘fayre house’ here. However, there is no visible evidence of this building, at least on the exterior where the main facade suggests a classic house from the early-to-mid 18th century of seven bays and two storeys (with perhaps the third added later). Around 1785, soon after Laurence Harman Parsons had inherited the estate, enlargements were made with the construction of slightly projecting wings, single-storey to the east and two-storey to the west. Further alterations took place in the mid-19th century when Newcastle passed into the possession of Laurence Harman King-Harman; the Dutch-style gable over the centre bay probably dates from this period, along with the entrance porch containing a family coat of arms. Internally, the building has undergone many alterations also, so that it is now not easy to detect what is from any particular period. However, there are striking – and now highly coloured – neo-classical Adamesque ceilings in the former drawing and dining rooms, the former featuring a large oval set in a rectangular frame, in which corner panels depict musical instruments. The dining room ceiling is centred on a diamond pattern decorated with urns and scrolling foliage. There is also some extant neo-classical plasterwork on the main staircase.  





While the Newcastle estate may have run to more than 38,000 acres in the 1880s, by the time Colonel Wentworth King-Harman died in 1919, various land acts meant that it had shrunk to less than 1,000 acres. His son, Major Alexander King-Harman, sold more land to the Department of Lands in 1934, leaving just the demesne thereafter. Following the major’s death in 1949, Newcastle was inherited by a cousin, Captain Robert Douglas King-Harman, who two years later sold the house and surrounding land for £11,000 to a religious order, the Missionary Sisters of the Holy Rosary. The house was used as a retirement home for nuns and also as a boarding school, but the Missionary Sisters remained for less than two decades, leaving in 1968, after which Newcastle changed hands on a number of occasions and was run as an hotel. Although it is not open to the public at the moment, the property’s current owner, a Hong Kong businessman, applied to the local authority last August for planning permission to create a holiday park on the surrounding land, incorporating 99 mobile homes, together with ‘an area for touring pitches and casual camping spaces’, a reception hut, a playground and separate grass play area. The adjacent woodland accommodates a Centre Parcs holiday resort which also intends to expand its facilities.





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Second Time Around

Dowth Hall, County Meath was first discussed here in December 2012, when the house and surrounding land were offered for sale. Now, more than a decade later, the place has come back on the market. Below is the original text, along with fresh photographs of Dowth Hall taken in recent weeks. 



Located midway between Slane and Drogheda, and immediately north of the river Boyne, Dowth is today known as the site of one of a number of important Neolithic passage tombs in County Meath, others in its immediate vicinity including Newgrange and Knowth. But Dowth deserves to be renowned also for an important mid-18th century house. Dowth Hall dates from c.1760 and was built for John, Viscount Netterville (1744-1826). His family, of Anglo-Norman origin, had been settled in the area since at least the 12th century: in 1217 Luke Netterville was selected to be Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. That religious streak remained with them and come the 16th century Reformation, the Nettervilles remained determinedly Roman Catholic. For this adherence some of them suffered greatly; when Drogheda fell to Oliver Cromwell in September 1649 the Jesuit priest Robert Netterville was captured and tortured, subsequently dying of the injuries sustained. Nevertheless, the Nettervilles survived, and even acquired a viscountcy. They also held onto their estates, one of a number of families – the Plunketts of Killeen Castle and the Prestons of Gormanston spring to mind – who retained both their religious faith and their lands, thereby disproving the idea that all Catholics automatically suffered displacement during the Penal era.





The sixth Viscount was only aged six on the death of his father, the latter dismissed by Mrs Delaney as ‘A fop and a fool, but a lord with a tolerable estate, who always wears fine clothes’ and otherwise only notable for having been indicted the year before his son’s birth for the murder of a valet (he was afterwards honourably acquitted by the House of Lords). The young Lord Netterville was raised by his widowed mother and spent much time in Dublin where the family owned a fine house at 29 Upper Sackville (now O’Connell) Street. The old castle in Dowth seems to have fallen into ruin and so, a few years after coming of age, Viscount Netterville undertook to construct a new house on his Meath estate. As is so often the case, information about the architect responsible for Dowth Hall is scanty. The common supposition is that the building was designed by George Darley (1730-1817), who had been employed for this purpose by Lord Netterville in Dublin where he was also the architect of a number of other houses. And indeed, from the exterior Dowth Hall, rusticated limestone ground floor and tall ashlar first floor with windows alternately topped by triangular and segmental pediments, looks like an Italianate town palazzo transported into the Irish countryside; not least thanks to its plain sides, the house seems more attuned to the streets of Milan than to the rich pasturelands of Meath.





The real delight of Dowth lies in its extravagantly decorated interiors, where a master stuccadore has been allowed free hand. The drawing room (originally dining room) is especially fanciful with rococo scrolls and tendrils covering wall panels and the ceiling’s central light fitting suspended from the claws of an eagle around which flutter smaller birds. None of the other ground floor rooms quite match this boldness but they all contain superlative plaster ornamentation, with looped garlands being a notable feature of the library. Again, the person responsible for this work is unknown, but on the basis of comparative similarities with contemporary stuccowork at 86 St Stephen’s Green in Dublin (on which George Darley is supposed to have worked) Dowth Hall’s decoration is usually attributed to Robert West (died 1790). Although not as extensive, there is even a certain amount of plasterwork decoration in the main bedrooms on the first floor, which is most unusual. And the house still retains its original chimneypieces (that in the entrance hall even has its Georgian basket grate), along with fine panelled doors and other elements from the property’s original construction. This makes it of enormous importance, since many other similar buildings underwent refurbishment and modernisation in the 19th century during which they lost older features.





There are reasons why Dowth Hall has survived almost unaltered since first built 250 years ago. The sixth Viscount Netterville, somewhat eccentric, fell into dispute with the local priest and was banned from the chapel on his own land; in retaliation, he built a ‘tea house’ on top of the Neolithic tomb from which he claimed to follow religious services through a telescope. But then he seems to have given up living at Dowth and moved back to Dublin. He never married and on dying at the age of 82 left a will with no less than nine codicils. One of these insisted that the Dowth estate go to whoever inherited the title, but it took eight years and a lot of litigation for the rightful heir, a distant cousin, to establish his claim. He did so at considerable cost and so, despite marrying an heiress, was obliged to offer Dowth for sale; the last Lord Netterville, another remote cousin, again died without heirs in 1882 and the title became extinct. Meanwhile Dowth was finally bought from the Chancery Court in 1850 by Richard Gradwell, younger son of a wealthy Catholic family from Lancashire. His heirs continued to live in the house for a century, but then sold up in the early 1950s when the place again changed hands. It did so one more time around twenty years later when acquired by two local bachelor farmers who moved into Dowth Hall. Following their respective deaths (the second at the start of last year), a local newspaper reported that the siblings had gone to Drogheda ‘every Saturday night, would attend the Fatima novena at 7.30pm then would walk over West Street to see what was going on, although they never took a drink or went to pubs.’ Now Dowth Hall is for sale, and there must be concern that it finds a sympathetic new owner because the house is in need of serious attention. It comes with some 420 acres of agricultural land, which means a sale is assured but that could be to the building’s disadvantage: it might fall into further desuetude if the farm alone was of interest to a purchaser. Too many instances of this have occurred in the past and it must not be allowed to happen here. One feels there ought to be some kind of vetting process to ensure prospective buyers demonstrate sufficient appreciation of the house. Only somebody with the same vision and flair as the sixth Lord Netterville should be permitted to acquire Dowth Hall.



Dowth Hall, along with 420 acres, was sold in January for €5 million. Now with 552 acres, the house is back on the market for €10 million. 

The Finest 18th century Ecclesiastical Building in Ireland



‘The new church in this city is a very beautiful one, the body of it is in the same stile exactly as that of Belfast already described; the total length 170 feet, the breadth 58. The length of’the body of the church 92, the height 40, breadth between the pillars 26. The isle (which I do not remember at Belfast) is 58 by 45.
A room on one side the steeple space for the bishop’s court, 24 by 18; on the other side a room of the same size for the vestry, and 28 feet square left for a steeple when their funds will permit. The whole is light and beautiful, it was built by subscription and there is a fine organ bespoke at London.’
Description of Christ Church Cathedral, Waterford from Arthur Young’s A Tour in Ireland, 1776-1779.
There has been a Christian place of worship on the site of Christ Church Cathedral since the 11th century and famously in 1170 this was the venue for the marriage of Strongbow (Richard de Clare, second Earl of Pembroke) and Aoife, daughter of Dermot MacMurrough. In 1210, the original building was replaced by a new cathedral which survived until the 18th century when the city’s corporation expressed a desire to erect a modern structure. However, the bishop of the time, Richard Chevenix, was reluctant to allow the old cathedral’s destruction so, according to local legend, it was arranged that one morning, as he walked past the building, a quantity of rubble and dust would be dropped from the roof onto his path, thereby encouraging him to agree with the corporation’s proposal. The first plans for a new cathedral were drawn up in 1739 by William Halfpenny (to whom the design of the original hunting lodge at Castlecor, County Longford is also attributed, see: A Worthy Recipient « The Irish Aesthete) but these were not carried out. In 1773 Dublin architect Thornas Ivory was asked to report on the condition of the cathedral and recommended that it be rebuilt. Nevertheless, he did not get the commission, this going instead to a local man, John Roberts.





John Roberts was born in Waterford in either 1712 or 1714, son of architect and builder Thomas Roberts whose own father, also called Thomas and described as ‘a Welshman of property and beauty’ had settled in the city in 1680. It is believed that as a young man, John Roberts spent some time in London, although nothing is known of what he did there and to whom, if anyone, he was apprenticed. Returning to Waterford around 1744, he fell in love, and eloped, with Mary Susannagh Sautelle, daughter of a well-to-do Huguenot family who did not approve of the relationship; as a result, she was disinherited and the couple’s first couple of years were difficult (they were, on the other hand, very happy together and went on to have 22 children, of which eight survived to adulthood). In 1746 the aforementioned Bishop Richard Chenevix, who knew both the Roberts and Sautelle families, gave the young architect his first great opportunity, inviting him to complete the episcopal palace, originally designed by Richard Castle but left unfinished at the time of the latter’s death. Thereafter, other commissions followed, although not all of them can be confirmed. Among those outside Waterford city which have been attributed to Roberts are the great forecourt at Curraghmore (see Now Available « The Irish Aesthete) and Cappoquin (see Risen from the Ashes « The Irish Aesthete), both in County Waterford, as well as Tyrone House, County Galway (see A High House on High Ground « The Irish Aesthete) and Moore Hall, County Mayo (see When Moore is Less « The Irish Aesthete). Within and in the immediate vicinity of Waterford city, Roberts – who took a long lease on the old bishop’s palace beside the cathedral – designed several other buildings such as the Assembly Rooms and Playhouse (1783), a new Leper Hospital (1785, now an apartment complex), Newtown House (1786, now Newtown School) and a private residence for William Morris (1795, today the Chamber of Commerce). Famously, 20 years after designing Christ Church, in 1793 he was commissioned to design a second cathedral in Waterford: dedicated to the Most Holy Trinity, this was the  first Roman Catholic cathedral built in Ireland since the Reformation.  The commission also proved to be the death of Roberts. Accustomed to rising daily at 6am, one morning  he mistakenly got up at three and, going to inspect work at the cathedral, he found the place empty: sitting down, he fell asleep and as a result caught a serious chill that resulted in his demise in May 1796 at the age of 84. Popularly known as ‘Honest John Roberts’, it was later written that ‘to all in his employment he was especially kind and thoughtful, He was in the habit of paying half the wages to the wives on Saturday rnorn:ing, that they might purchase to advantage at the early market and he always gave to each the exact money and thus to some extent prevented a visit to the publichouse for change.’ He was also the founder of a remarkable dynasty, two of his sons being the artists Thomas Roberts and Thomas Sautelle Roberts, a grandson being Abraham Roberts, a general in the East India Company, and the latter’s son being Field Marshall Frederick Roberts, first Earl Roberts.





On January 17th 1774 the committee of Christ Church Cathedral met to consider the best method of either taking down and reconstructing or repairing the building. The members agreed that ‘the plain plan omitting the rustik work laid before the committee by Mr. John Roberts for re-building the cathedral appears to be the most eligible of any as yet produced to us. Estimate 23,704- 5s-6d. The old steeple to be taken down and the bells placed in the French church.’ (Evidently Roberts’ original design suggested a degree of rustication on the exterior of the cathedral, its exclusion being most likely on the grounds of cost). Work soon began and most of it was completed by 1779 at a cost of £5,397, somewhat higher than the original estimate, and even as late as 1783 subscriptions were still being raised for the steeple. Built using as much stone as was possible from its demolished  predecessor, the new Christ Church’s design is much indebted to the churches of James Gibbs which Roberts would have seen during his time in London as a young man. Here, for example, as in the case of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the limestone spire rises at the west end of the building, directly behind the portico, graduating from a square base in three stages up to the octagonal steeple; much of the detailing here is indebted to Gibbs’s spire for St Mary le Strand. Unlike the portico of St Martin-in-the-Fields with its six great Corinthian columns, that of Christ Church has just four of the Doric order, thereby making less of an impact than might otherwise be the case, but the side elevations and arrangement of windows clearly borrows from the London church. So too does the interior, even after being considerably re-ordered in the late 19th century. Entering through the west end portico, the visitor first steps into an open ante-chapel, separated from the main body of the cathedral by a screen supporting the organ; in this space, some funerary monuments salvaged from the old cathedral were installed (including a rather fine one to the brothers Nicholas and John FitzGerald by John van Nost). Beyond the screen, the nave, 80 feet long, is separated from the aisles by a splendid line of Corinthian columns supporting the barrel-vaulted ceiling.  The checkerboard floor of white marble and black limestone is original, as is the reredos at the east end with its pedestalled Corinthian columns and pilasters on either side of a centre panel with sunburst. The reredos was once topped by a line of urns, but these have since gone, along with other elements of Roberts’s scheme. We know how the interior once looked thanks to a print published in 1806. This shows that the nave was lined on either side by galleries resting on rusticated pedestals supporting the Corinthian columns; at ground level, there were the customary box pews. The ceiling decoration was somewhat different to that seen today, owing to a fire in October 1815, ‘occasioned by the neglect of some persons who were employed to attend a stove placed in the organ loft, for the purpose of airing it.’  Not only were the organ and surrounding woodwork destroyed but the ceiling so badly damaged that it had to be redecorated, but the result is unquestionably splendid. In 1889-91, the architect Thomas Drew carried out extensive alterations to the interior, including the galleries’ removal, new choir fittings, pulpit, lectern, the addition of architraves & mullions to windows, and the closing up of lower windows (the absence of galleries rendering these redundant).  In addition, the rusticated column pedestals were taken away and replaced with others of red Cork marble and carved Caen stone. So this is what we see today: a somewhat bastardised version of John Roberts’s design but still one beautiful enough to merit Mark Girouard’s 1992 description of Christ Church Cathedral as ‘the finest 18th century ecclesiastical building in Ireland.’ 


Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,





Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.





O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats.
Photographs of the Casino at Marino, Dublin, designed by Sir William Chambers for James Caulfield, Earl of Charlemont.