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Ireland's collectors: a historical perspective: collecting in Ireland today is often depicted solely as the pursuit by the nouveaux riches of trophy canvases by Jack B. Yeats. Yet, as William Laffan describes in this detailed analysis of contemporary Irish collectors, some remarkable and little-known collections of international significance are being formed, eclipsing even those of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy

Apollo, Sept, 2004 by William Laffan

Recently arrived in Dublin, a city whose skyline he was to transform, the English architect James Gandon was dismissive of Ireland's artistic scene. In a letter of 1781 he wrote, 'the few houses to which I had access scarcely possessed a picture or print, and those which they had were but indifferent, mostly suspended from the wall, without either flame or glass'. Continuing in this vein, he notes that there were 'but four collections of pictures of consequence ... the Duke of Leinster's, the Earl of Farnham's, the Earl of Charlemont's and Viscount Powerscourt's'. (1)

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Reading some press accounts of the Irish art market and collecting in Ireland today, one would be forgiven for thinking that much the same situation still prevailed, and that there were but a handful of collectors in Ireland that matter--and that all they were interested in were trophy pictures by Jack Yeats (Figs 1 and 2). Almost all media attention is paid to the half dozen or so tycoons who have taken the role (as well as many of the houses) of the Anglo-Irish peerage and the remarkable collections, largely of Irish paintings, which they have formed over the past three decades. Mostly household names as owners of newspapers, racehorses and airlines, these dynamic businessmen and their collecting habits make for good copy, and indeed some of their collections are discussed below. However, Gandon was not wholly accurate in his account of Irish collections in the eighteenth century. Likewise today, collecting in Ireland is a more complex, and interesting, phenomenon than the caricature of it sometimes purveyed in the press.

Recent research on the material culture of eighteenth-century Ireland, particularly the pioneering work of Toby Barnard, gives a far more accurate account of owning art in the period. Barnard notes that 'painted and printed images adorned eighteenth-century Ireland more widely than has usually been supposed' (2) and he has shown how widespread, and deeply rooted, was Irish consumption of art in the long eighteenth century. (3) Even then, and in direct contradiction to Gandon's jibes, 'the market for pictures in Ireland was buoyant'. (4) Collecting of paintings, prints, furniture and objects extended far beyond the handful of peers named by Gandon and even on occasion was within the means of the dispossessed Catholic Irish. (5)

In direct opposition to the situation prevailing today, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries those who could afford to assemble collections of pictures largely preferred European works and looked down on native productions. The first major picture collection in Ireland, that of the Ormondes of Kilkenny Castle, did not include a single work by a native artist, instead focusing on Dutch and Italian paintings. (6) Indeed, the snobbery surrounding imported works of art was such that the Irish landscape painter Robert Carver quipped that nobody would look at his paintings, but if he had let it be known that they were 'executed by Signor Somboldini, all the connoisseurs in town would flock about them attentively with their glasses, and cry out with rapture'. (7) Another eighteenth-century source noted that the preponderance of imported works of art meant native artists had 'no more to do than whores in time of pestilence, or lawyers in a summer vacation'. (8)

For the past few decades, the pattern of art buying among the newly wealthy Irish has changed utterly, with the native and local being valued almost to the total exclusion of English and continental works of the same type, date and quality. This has certainly served a welcome purpose. A generation or two ago, the signatures on paintings by eighteenth-century Irish artists such as William Ashford and George Barret were routinely erased by unscrupulous dealers in the hope that they could be passed off as works by Richard Wilson or some follower of Zuccarelli. Since then, Irish art has come to be appreciated almost to the same degree as Irish literature. However, as with any cycle, this almost exclusive interest in Irish art among Irish collectors is beginning to change.

One formidable collection that Gandon omitted to mention, even though it was largely formed by the brother-in-law of his principal patron, John Beresford, gives a nice sense of continuity between the eighteenth century and today. Mostly in the 1760s, Thomas Cobbe of Newbridge House formed a significant collection of old master pictures. Cobbe was advised in his collecting by the local vicar, and art historian, Mathew Pilkington, who was the first to write a biographical dictionary of artists in English. Pilkington used his knowledge to find the highest quality paintings for the Cobbes in Dublin, London and on the continent. It was at his urging that Cobbe purchased a masterpiece by Hobbema, A wooded landscape (now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington), who at the time was unfashionable. By relying on expert advice, and buying against the prevailing taste in the market, Cobbe secured a highly significant work that, with great sadness, his grandson Thomas sold, in provide stone cottages for his tenants in the Dublin mountains, thus saving them from the effects of the Great Famine. With the exception of only a few sales, the Cobbe collection has remained intact, and over the past few decades has been greatly expanded by Alec Cobbe, himself a painter, who has added many family portraits as well as significant works by Titian and Poussin. Much of the Cobbe collection is preserved in its original setting, Newbridge House, just north of Dublin. Now in the custody of Fingal County Council, the house is open tothe public. (9)

Apollo, Sept, 2004 by William Laffan

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