james wyatt’s irish masterpiece castle coole

JAMES WYATT’S IRISH MASTERPIECE CASTLE COOLE

Tuesday 12 November 2019 Castle Coole, Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland

J A M E S W Y A T T ’ S I R I S H M A S T E R P I E C E : C A S T L E C O O L ECastle Coole, Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland • Tuesday, 12th November 2019

The Irish Georgian Society, in partnership with the National Trust Northern Ireland presents a study day celebrating the rich architectural heritage, decorative interiors and designed landscape of Ireland’s finest eighteenth-century neo-classical house, Castle Coole, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh.

Castle Coole has been home to the Lowry Corry family since the late seventeenth century and continues to be home to Lord Bemore and his family. A Queen Anne mansion built by John Curle replaced the earlier defensive building and at the close of the eighteenth century this, in turn, was replaced by a house of unparalleled architectural grandeur, built to designs by James Wyatt for Armar Lowry-Corry, the 1st Earl of Belmore. The National Trust acquired Castle Coole in 1951, and today the conservation charity is responsible for managing the house along with the adjoining parkland.

The keynote speaker will be Dr John Martin Robinson, the acknowledged authority on James Wyatt. Other distinguished speakers include: Frances Bailey; William Laffan; Dr Patricia McCarthy; Dr Edward McParland; Christopher Monkhouse; Terence Reeves-Smyth; Dr William Roulston and David Skinner.

The conference commences at 11am with tea and scones and a welcome from Lord Belmore. In addition to the study day lectures, there will a tour of Castle Coole and lunch. The study will conclude at 5pm.

Date: Tuesday 12 November 2019

Venue: Castle Coole, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland

Study Day price: €90 to include tea/coffee and lunch

Study Day price with coach: €120 (Coach departs 8.15am from outside the gates of the Clayton Hotel, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. Coach returns to Ballsbridge for 7.30pm). Participants should bring identification with them.

Cover: A View of Castle Coole by John Preston Neale (1780–1847) (National Library of Ireland)

J A M E S W Y A T T ’ S I R I S H M A S T E R P I E C E : C A S T L E C O O L ECastle Coole, Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland • Tuesday, 12th November 2019

The study day has been convened by William Laffan, IGS committee member and Emmeline Henderson, IGS Assistant Director & Conservation Manager. It forms part of the IGS’s Conservation Education Programme, which is which is generously supported by the Merrion Property Group and John and Heather Picerne. Most importantly, we acknowledge the generosity and support of Lord Bemore and his family in making this event possible.

We acknowledge the invaluable support and assistance of Jim Chestnutt, General Manager, National Trust NI Fermanagh Property Group; Eva Ewart, Castle Coole Archivist; Leslie Fitzpatrick, Associate Curator, European Decorative Arts at Art Institute of Chicago; Róisín Lambe, IGS Events and Membership Co-ordinator; Laura Murray, House & Collections Manager, Castle Coole, National Trust NI; and Amy Hastings, IGS Architectural Conservation & Planning Committee Chair.

Elevation of Richard Morrison’s Stable Block

PROGRAMMEC a s t l e C o o l e S t u d y D a y • T u e s d a y 1 2 t h N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 9

11.00 am Study Day commences with coffee and scones and welcome from Lord Belmore

SESSION ONEChair: Donough Cahill, Irish Georgian Society, Executive Director

11.30 am The Queen Anne House at Castle Coole Dr William Roulston, Research Director, Ulster Historical Foundation

11.50 am James Wyatt in Ireland Dr John Martin Robinson, Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk, Maltravers

Herald Extraordinary and Vice Chairman of the Georgian Group

12.15 pm The Classicism of Castle Coole Dr Edward McParland, Architectural Historian, FTCD (Emeritus)

12.35 pm ‘Built to impress’: living in Castle Coole Dr Patricia McCarthy, Independent Scholar

12.50 pm Questions & Answers

SESSION TWOChair: Victoria Browne, Director of the Castletown Foundation and Independent Scholar

2.45 pm Picturing Castle Coole William Laffan, Author and Curator

3.00 pm A Benchmark for Exploring James Wyatt’s Irish Domestic Commissions: the enduring influence of the Castle Coole hall furniture

Christopher Monkhouse, former Curator of Decorative Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago

3.20 pm ‘In the most Respectable Situation’: the country house trade of Patrick Boylan, paper stainer

David Skinner, historic wallpaper conservator and historian

3.30 pm Questions & Answers

1.00 pm - 2.45 pm: Lunch/tours of Castle Coole

PROGRAMMEC a s t l e C o o l e S t u d y D a y • T u e s d a y 1 2 t h N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 9

SESSION THREEChair: Primrose Wilson, IGS Committee Member, Chair of the Follies Trust and

President of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society

3.35 pm Castle Coole: Curation and Conservation Considerations Frances Bailey, Lead Curator, National Trust in Northern Ireland

3.55 pm The Development of Castle Coole’s Designed Landscape Terence Reeves-Smyth, Senior Inspector for Historic Monuments and

Buildings, Historic Environment Division, Department for Communities 4.15 pm Questions & Answers

4.30 pm Close and thank you Emmeline Henderson, Irish Georgian Society, Assistant Director &

Conservation Manager

5.00 pm Coach departs Caste Coole for Dublin arriving approx. 7.30pm.

Castle Coole, The Bow Room

STUDY DAY ABSTRACTSC a s t l e C o o l e S t u d y D a y • T u e s d a y 1 2 t h N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 9

“The Queen Anne House at Castle Coole” by Dr William RoulstonIn 1709 John Curle prepared a set of plans and elevations for a new house at Castle Coole. The house impressed contemporaries with one chronicler of Fermanagh writing that the Corry residence had been ‘rebuilt in a stately and costly manner’. This talk will discuss these designs, placing them in the context of developments in domestic architecture in the early eighteenth century with a particular focus on the building works undertaken by the Fermanagh gentry.

Front Elevation of the 1709 house at Castle Coole

James Wyatt in Ireland by Dr John Martin RobinsonJohn Martin Robinson will speak on James Wyatt’s Irish architectural practice conducted through his Dublin collaborator Thomas Penrose, a Quaker, and with assistance from the Johnstons and other Irish architects. Wyatt conducted his Irish practice by post and only visited once, travelling to Slane Castle, Co Meath in 1785. The paper will focus on Wyatt’s work in Ireland, notably including Castle Coole, his masterpiece, and an Anglo-Irish collaboration, using London, Dublin and local craftsmen. Wyatt oversaw the project from his London office and never travelled to Fermanagh!

Portrait of James Wyatt engraved by J. Singleton


“The Classicism of Castle Coole” by Dr Edward McParlandThe talk will be based on a close observation of the uses of classicism including the orders in Castle Coole, bearing in mind John Martin Robinson’s claim that generally Wyatt’s ‘handling of the classical tradition was among the most original and innovative manifested by any English architect, not just those of his own age’.

Elevation of Castle Coole, by James Wyatt 1790 (Private Collection)

“‘Built to impress’: Living in Castle Coole” by Dr Patricia McCarthyThe architectural plans of Richard Johnston and James Wyatt for Castle Coole show how the house was planned to facilitate the lifestyle of the family who commissioned it. This talk will look at the plans, together with the bespoke furniture and decoration designed to adorn the public rooms of the building, to examine how this ambition was achieved.

Plan of Basement, Richard Johnston, 1789 (Private Collection)


“Picturing Castle Coole” by William LaffanThis paper will review some nineteenth-century images of the house by Sir William Smith, John Preston Neale and William Greenlees before exploring a series of more recent images of Castle Coole’s landscape and interiors by artists including T.P. Flanagan and Patrick Prendergast.

Castle Coole from the Sandpit by Terence Philip Flanagan, RHA (1929-2011)

“A Benchmark for Exploring James Wyatt’s Irish Domestic Commissions: the Enduring Influence of the Castle Coole Hall Furniture” by Christopher MonkhouseHall benches with distinctive sabre legs set the stage for a least three of James Wyatt’s domestic commissions in Ireland, beginning at Mount Kennedy, County Wicklow. Perhaps the best-known examples of this type can be found in the Entrance Hall at Castle Coole. These have come to enjoy almost iconic status since their selection to grace the cover of Irish Furniture by Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin and James Peill, published by Yale in 2007. The paper will explore how Wyatt’s repeated use of this klismos-style bench was influential on Irish patrons and cabinetmakers, and will look at surviving examples made in the early nineteenth century by Dublin’s best-known firm of Mack Williams and Gibton.

Detail from the cover of Irish Furniture: Woodwork and Carving in Ireland by Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin and James Peill, showing one of the Castle Coole Hall Benches. (Photograph courtesy of James Fennell)


Detail of wallpaper by Patrick Boylan in the State Bedroom at Castle Coole

Castle Coole: Curation and Conservation Considerations by Frances BaileyFrances Bailey will give a brief overview of restoration and conservation work carried out by the National Trust from the major stonework project in the 1980s to the reweaving of the library curtains in 2010, and concentrating on current initiatives in the basement service areas, the challenges of fire compartmentation, services and environmental control. Each year the Trust wrestles with the question of how to maintain a building of such high quality on a limited budget, and how it is currently un-picking work that was done in the not-too-distant past.

The Saloon at Castle Coole


‘In the most Respectable Situation’: the Country House Trade of Patrick Boylan, Paper Stainer by David SkinnerPatrick Boylan, the leading Dublin decorator and wallpaper manufacturer of his day, supplied the crimson flock paper for the State Bedroom in Castle Coole. His men were, in his own words, ‘at work in six or seven different counties... often from 6 to 12 months employed in noblemen’s houses’. Using contemporary accounts and correspondence, this paper will look at the business of making, transporting and installing paper hangings for the most discerning and demanding of clients.

Right: Detail of wallpaper by Patrick Boylan in the State Bedroom at Castle Coole


The Development of Castle Coole’s Designed Landscape by Terence Reeves-SmythCastle Coole’s late eighteenth-century designed landscape, created as a setting for one of Ireland’s finest neo-classical mansions, retains much of its original integrity as a naturalised landscape park of 900-acres set in a drumlin topography incorporating three lakes. The park includes important remains of an early eighteenth-century formal landscape, associated with a Queen Anne period manor of c.1707. Prior to the building of the neo-classical mansion, a naturalised ‘New Park’ was laid out from 1780-85 by the landscape designer William King. This park was subsequently expanded in 1813 and Richard Morrison’s magnificent stable block and farm buildings were added in 1817.

Aerial view of Castle Coole

BIOGRAPHIESC a s t l e C o o l e S t u d y D a y • T u e s d a y 1 2 t h N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 9

Frances Bailey is Lead Curator for the National Trust in Northern Ireland and has worked for the National Trust in a curatorial capacity for some 30 years, during which time she has been involved in many conservation and building projects including the recent major restoration of Mount Stewart in County Down. She is a director of the Castletown Foundation.

Victoria Browne is former Head of Collections and Museum Standards at the Irish Heritage Trust. She is a director of the Castletown Foundation and a former board member of the Irish Georgian Society. Victoria compiled the catalogue of the collections at Castletown House, County Kildare, contributed to the recent IGS catalogue, Exhibiting Art in Georgian Ireland (2018) and is currently engaged in postgraduate research on the interiors of Irish country houses in the Victorian period.

Donough Cahill is Executive Director of the Irish Georgian Society, where he oversees its operations in promoting the appreciation and protection of Ireland’s architectural heritage and allied arts. Most recently he was responsible for managing the restoration of the City Assembly House, which now serves as the society’s headquarters and as a hub for promoting heritage and culture in the heart of Georgian Dublin.

Emmeline Henderson is the Assistant Director and Conservation Manager of the Irish Georgian Society. She manages the IGS Conservation Education Programme to include the Society’s annual Traditional Building & Conservation Skills in Action Exhibition, its ‘Conserving Your Period House’ courses, its online conservation skills and academic registers, as well as other seminars, conferences and study days relating to the conservation and promotion of Ireland’s architecture and decorative arts.

William Laffan is an author and curator who has published extensively on Irish art and architecture, with books including Ancestral Interiors, Photographs of the Irish Country House by Patrick Prendergast (2010) and Russborough, A Great Irish House its Families and Collections (2015, with Kevin Mulligan). He is currently researching a monograph on the eighteenth-century portrait painter Nathaniel Hone (forthcoming 2020) and preparing an exhibition of contemporary Irish photographic art for the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (2021).

Patricia McCarthy is the author of Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland (Yale University Press, 2016); ‘A Favourite Study’: Building the King’s Inns (Dublin 2006) and of numerous articles and essays. She completed her PhD at Trinity College, Dublin, on ’The use of space in Irish country houses 1720-1840’ and has contributed to two volumes (II and IV) of Art and Architecture of Ireland (Royal Irish Academy and Yale University Press, 2014). Her current research interest is the consumption of claret in eighteenth-century Ireland.


Edward McParland is a retired lecturer in architectural history at Trinity College, Dublin and was elected Pro-Chancellor of the University in 2013. An honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, a vice-president of Ulster Architectural Heritage and a member of the Royal Irish Academy, he is the author of James Gandon (1985) and Public Architecture in Ireland 1680-1760 (2001). Co-founder, with Nicholas Robinson, of the Irish Architectural Archive, he is currently working on a collection of essays on architectural classicism.

Christopher Monkhouse served as curator of European and American Decorative Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design for 15 years. After a spell in Pittsburgh as the founding curator of the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art, in 1995 he moved to Minneapolis to take up the post of James Ford Bell Curator of Architecture, Design, Decorative Arts, Craft and Sculpture, which he held until 2007 when he was appointed Eloise W. Martin Curator of European Decorative Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago from which he retired in 2017. Most recently he curated the Art Institute’s widely acclaimed exhibition Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690-1840 (2015), having first come to Ireland in the 1960s pursuing post-graduate research at the Courtauld Institute on canal hotel design.

Terence Reeves-Smyth is an archaeologist and architectural and garden historian, currently working on a book about the Irish seed and nursery trade. He is Senior Inspector for Historic Monuments and Buildings at the Historic Environment Division, Department for Communities, based in Belfast. His publications include Irish Gardens (2001) and Gardening before Cromwell (1999).

John Martin Robinson is Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk, Maltravers Herald Extraordinary and Vice Chairman of the Georgian Group. He has been an architectural writer to Country Life for 45 years and has written over 30 books including a history of the Travellers Club, a study of Georgian Model Farms, monographs on country houses and royal palaces, as well as books on heraldry and a biography of Cardinal Consalvi. His special interest in the Wyatt family of architects, beginning with a D.Phil thesis on Samuel Wyatt, under Howard Colvin, at Oxford, culminated in his monograph on James Wyatt published by Yale University Press in 2013.

William Roulston is Research Director of the Ulster Historical Foundation. He was awarded a PhD in Archaeology by Queen’s University Belfast in 2003 and has written and edited a number of books including Fermanagh: History and Society (co-edited with Eileen Murphy, 2004), Restoration Strabane, 1660-1714 (2007), and Abercorn: The Hamiltons of Barons Court (2014).


David Skinner specialises in the printing, conserving and writing about historic wallpapers in Ireland. His studio has produced many hand-printed reproductions of Irish patterns which have been used in restoration projects, domestic interiors and film productions across the world. He is the author of Wallpaper in Ireland 1700–1900 (Churchill House Press, 2014).

Primrose Wilson, CBE, is the chair of the Irish Georgian Society’s Architectural Conservation Grants Committee. She is a founding director of The Follies Trust and The Primrose Trust, a past board member of The Heritage Council and of the Irish Georgian Society. Currently President of Ulster Architectural Heritage, she was recently awarded honorary membership of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland.

Castle Coole portico by Terence Reeves-Smyth

GETTING THEREC a s t l e C o o l e S t u d y D a y • T u e s d a y 1 2 t h N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 9

Getting to Castle Coole, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, BT74 6FZ:

By car from Dublin: (2 hrs, 20 mins) Follow M3, N3 and A509 to A4 in Enniskillen. Please note that the main entrance to the estate is across the road from the Ardhowen Theatre.

By bus from Dublin: Take Bus 30 from Busáras to Enniskillen.

By car from Belfast: (1 hr, 40 mins) on Belfast to Enniskillen road (A4).

By bus from Belfast: Enniskillen to Clones (connections from Belfast).

By private coach from Dublin with the Irish Georgian Society:

8.15 am IGS leaves Clayton Hotel, Ballsbridge (*estimated journey time is 2 hours and 20 mins but extra travel time has been factored in for traffic delays and the unforeseen). Arrive Castle Coole at 11am.

5.00 pm Coach departs Caste Coole at 5pm and arrives Ballsbridge for approx. 7.30pm.

Castle Coole by Terence Reeves-Smyth

JAMES WYATT’S IRISH MASTERPIECE:

CASTLE COOLE

BOOKING FORM

Venue: Castle Coole, Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland

Date: Tuesday 19th November 2019 Price: €120 (with coach) €90 (without coach)

Pre-booking with the Irish Georgian Society is essential as places are limited. Bookings can be made online through the Irish Georgian Society website www.igs.ie or by post using the booking form below.

Booking forms should be returned to:

Irish Georgian Society58 South William Street, Dublin 2ph. 01-679 8675Email: [email protected]

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Address:

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Dietary requirements: please circle: Vegetarian Coeliac Nut allergy

* Please ensure you provide the IGS with your email and phone number in order that we may contact you in the unlikely event of a change to the programme.

Cancellation PolicyBookings cancelled more than 7 days in advance will be refunded, less an administration fee of €10 per person.

Cancellations within 7 days will not be refunded. Delegate names can be changed up to 7 days in advance.

james wyatt’s irish masterpiece castle coole

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