5How Irish houses looked 100 years ago

Tag : burnt-out print

CRITICAL TEXTS by Robert O'Byrne 3: The Georgian Society Records PAINTINGS AND furniture cannot be properly appreciated without anunderstanding of the context for which they were designed and made.
This would seem a self-evident truth, and yet architecture and fineart are often studied independently of one another.
Ideally they should be examined together and yet the fracturedcharacter of Ireland's history makes this a singularly difficulttask; so much relevant material was lost during the first quarterof the last century that it is hard to imagine how the interiors ofour historic houses - a great many of which have been destroyed andtheir contents scattered - were once furnished.
One critical source for such information are the five volumescomprising the Georgian Society Records, published between1909-1913. The short-lived Georgian Society was founded 100 yearsago. As the preface to the first volume explains, it had a veryspecific purpose: "To inspect and note the eighteenth-century (orGeorgian) architectural and decorative work which remains inDublin, and to record such work by means of sketches, measureddrawings, and photographs...".
The driving force behind the new organisation was the Rev JohnPentland Mahaffy, subsequently provost of Trinity College, Dublin,who lived in a fine 18th century house, 38 North Great George'sStreet.
To achieve his purpose, he drew around him an impressive group ofsupporters and authors including Walter Strickland (discussed onthis page two weeks ago) and the architects Page L Dickinson andRichard Caulfield Orpen (brother of the painter William Orpen).
As is clear from the preface, the Georgian Society's primaryinterest lay in 18th century architecture and in buildings foundwithin the centre of Dublin but it soon began to extend beyondthese rather artificial boundaries.
Thus the fourth volume opens with a long essay by Mahaffy on thefurnishing of Georgian houses (he had written a similar essay onSociety in Georgian Dublin for Volume III) in which he draws onthree inventories lent by Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence.
These detailed the furniture contents of Howth Castle in 1748, 1751and 1753 and listed items sent to the Dublin residence of the 27thLord Howth. Mahaffy includes the entire first inventory andcorrectly observes that the furniture, even for so great a memberof the Irish aristocracy, "was quite simple".
The diningroom, for example, held 10 mahogany chairs and a settee,a large mirror in a gilt frame, a large carpet and not much else(although presumably there was also a dining table).
This relative spareness in decoration appears to have remained thefashion in many Irish houses over the following 150 years, notleast because after the Act of Union in 1801 there was not a lot ofmoney to spend on buying new furniture. Where complete roomsfeature among the photographs of the Georgian Society Records, withfew exceptions they tend to hold only a small quantity offurniture, often pushed back against the walls as had been thestyle in the first half of the 18th century.
The second volume, for example, features images of the interior ofEly House when it was still a private home occupied by Sir WilliamThornley Stoker (brother of author Bram Stoker) with pictures hunglow on the lofty drawingroom walls and a diningroom sideboardfeaturing a splendid display of old silver.
In this respect, the illustrations are an invaluable resource sincethey provide us today with an idea of how Irish houses werefurnished before the social and political turmoil that would followfrom 1916 onwards.
And a large number of those places have vanished altogether, suchas Drogheda House, which stood on the upper eastern side ofO'Connell Street until lost in the Easter Rising; with a frontageextending 66ft, it contained wonderfully pretty rococo stuccoworkreproduced in a series of photographs in the society's thirdvolume.
Likewise the staircase and interiors of Antrim House (now the siteof the National Maternity Hospital) can be seen thanks to theforesight of the Georgian Society, as well as the terrace of houseson Upper Merrion Street just before this was cleared away for theconstruction of what is now Government Buildings.
The final volume of the series is especially interesting, since itfeatures houses outside Dublin some of which, such as Summerhill,Co Meath, no longer exist while others have changed hands andtherefore no longer contain their original furnishings.
Here are photographs of Castletown and Carton when they were stillowned by members of the Conolly and FitzGerald families, the roomsrichly filled with furniture and paintings which had been in placefrom the 18th century but have since been largely dispersed.
It all makes for fascinating, if somewhat melancholy, viewing.Volume V contains a county-by-county listing of Georgian houseswith the names of their original and present owners and someinformation on their architecture. It is by no means complete butstill important.
Other publications have since complemented the Georgian Society'swork as a source of information on how old Irish houses were oncefurnished. Ten years ago, Country Life published a book on Irishhouses and gardens drawing on its own inestimable archives. Amongthe earliest photographs included are those showing Lambay andHowth Castle not long after Edwin Lutyens had worked on bothproperties; happily in each case their interiors have scarcelychanged in the interim.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about other houses covered,such as Heywood, Co Laois which was destroyed by fire in 1950 andPowerscourt which suffered the same fate in 1974.
Also worth noting is a book published in 2002, Randal MacDonnell'sThe Lost Houses of Ireland although the title is something of amisnomer since the majority of properties included survive to thisday, even if not all of them are in the same private hands. Oncemore, the pictures, taken for the Irish Tatler and Sketch between1947 and 1961, are of particular interest and again showfurnishings since lost from the likes of Rockingham, Co Roscommon(another victim of fire in 1957) and Killeen Castle, Co Meath(burnt out by arsonists in 1981).
Both this book and that produced by Country Life remain easy tofind but the same is not the case for the Georgian Society Records.Once the fifth volume appeared in 1913, the organisationresponsible was dissolved (happily to be succeeded by thestill-extant Irish Georgian Society in 1958).
Only 300 copies of the first volume were printed, but this numberhad risen to 600 by the time the last one came out. Nevertheless,especially as complete sets they soon became exceedingly rare andtherefore in 1969 a second edition was published by the IrishUniversity Press with an introduction by the Hon Desmond Guinness.
This in turn is now highly prized - and priced - and it is surelytime some enterprising publisher thought to issue the five volumesagain. As a record of how Irish houses looked a century ago, theGeorgian Society Records are invaluable.
•Georgian Society to Irish Georgian Society 1908-2008 , an exhibition of photographs, can be seen at the IrishArchitectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, Dublin from now untilSeptember 5th.
Featuring images of Irish buildings and their interiors from thepast century, the exhibition includes images taken for the originalGeorgian Society from 1908 onwards. When the Irish ArchitecturalArchive was founded, one of its first purchases was the IrishGeorgian Society's own extensive collection of photographs whichincluded a number of items from the earlier organisation. Theexhibition may be seen Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 5pm and admissionis free.
© 2008 The Irish Times
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times