42 The epitome of Ireland
The first great Palladian country house of Ireland is undergoing restoration and conservation at the hands of the Office of Public Works. Jeremy Musson reports
The first great Palladian country house of Ireland is undergoing restoration and conservation at the hands of the Office of Public Works. Jeremy Musson reports
Castletown House, Co Kildare
ACrisp, pale giant of a building, Castletown House, in Co Kildare, was built by William ‘speaker’ Conolly in the 1720s. standing in open parkland, the palladian-inspired house ( Fig 1) echoes, in its grand elevation, the palazzo Farnese. The central block —13 bays of two storeys plus attic over a raised basement—is linked by curved ionic colonnades to two-storey pavilions of seven bays each. At the ends of these are pedimented gateways, both practical and poetic, giving access to stable and kitchen courtyards while adding to the gravity and expressiveness of the ensemble.
in 1732, the travel diarist John Loveday described it as ‘much the grandest house we have seen in ireland… very lofty and deep’. The composition is elegant and austere, the decision to place the pale central block between darker wings adding to its impact. The formal rhythm of the windows is punctuated by alternating segmental and triangular pediments on the first-floor piano nobile. Another visitor, richard Twiss, wrote in 1775: ‘This [is] i believe the only house in ireland to which the term palace can be applied.’
Few encountering the house today would doubt its international significance and, in the mid 1960s, it became one of ireland’s conservation causes célèbres. it was rescued from development and despoliation by the Hon Desmond Guinness, who bought the house and 120 acres in 1967, and the efforts of the irish Georgian society (which ran it) and many donors and supporters. in 1979, it was vested in the Castle-
town Foundation, from which it passed to the care of the state in 1994.
It is now more than half a century since the house ceased to be the residence of the Conollys. Under the leadership of Mary Heffernan of National Historic Properties, Castletown is entering a new phase. Following major repair and restoration, the Office of Public Works (OPW) is now tackling the interiors, presentation and ancillary areas. The home farm is being adapted to provide visitor facilities and, this summer, restored pleasure gardens will be unveiled.
The OPW also has the active and valuable involvement of the Castletown Foundation, chaired by Christopher Moore. The foundation has an advisory role and owns the majority of the collection, including important furniture and paintings original to the house ( Fig 4). This has recently been catalogued in Castletown: Decorative Arts (2011), which also contains the most definitive account of the building’s history. The foundation is made up of experienced volunteers from academia, planning and conservation.
It is remarkable that, after nearly 50 years, the preservation of Castletown, although safe in public ownership, still generates great goodwill and interest—inspired by continuing research into the Conolly family, the house, its contents and its landscape setting.
Current projects within the house include the conservation of the Red Drawing Room, which retains faded 1870s hangings, probably Italian. Visitors are invited to share in the debate about how best to preserve its atmosphere and watch the ongoing conservation of the silk. This is being accompanied by weaving of new fabric for curtains. The aim is to preserve some of the elegance of the original scheme while retaining the effects of the passage of time.
The intensely social and public ambition of Conolly’s original vision for Castletown is reflected in a new itinerary of cultural and public activities. After the house’s current exhibition of modern art (by Richard Gorman), it will host, in 2017, events devoted to the 350th anniversary of Jonathan Swift’s birth. The following year will be dedicated to celebrating the artistic interests of Lady Louisa Conolly, third daughter of the Duke of Richmond and one of the four famous Lennox sisters who feature in Stella Tillyard’s 1994 book Aristocrats.
Born as the son of an innkeeper in 1662, William Conolly rose to immense
This is the only house in Ireland to which the term palace can be applied
power and wealth in the aftermath of the Ôgloriousõ Revolution of 1688. A trained lawyer, he first dealt in, and then bought up, the land confiscated by William III from Catholic supporters of James II in Ireland (at his death in 1729, he owned more than 100,000 acres). In 1692, he was elected to the Irish House of Commons, where he sat for the next 37 years and, in 1694, married the well-connected daughter of Sir Albert Conyngham.
He was appointed Speaker of the Irish House of Commons at the accession of George I in 1715, an office of enormous power and authority. The position he established for himself in Ireland was similar to that of his English contemporary Sir Robert Walpole. Like Walpoleñwho built Houghton Hallñ he understood the role of architecture in bolstering his authority.
He left no written account of what he set out to do at Castletown, but, as Maurice Craig and the Knight of Glin have pointed out ( Country Life, March 27, 1969), there is evidence of Conolly commissioning designs for the house from the Florentine Alessandro Galilei, who visited Ireland in 1718. In a letter of May 18, 1717, John Molesworth wrote of bringing Galilei, Ôthe best Architect in Europeõ, to visit Connolly in Ireland. (Molesworthõs father wrote that year, that he, son John, Galilei and Thomas Hewett, were to be Ôthe New Junta for Architectureõ).
Galilei was paid for designs in 1719, and spoke of having designed a Ôpalazzo di Villa p[er] il My Lord Governatore di quel regnoõ. Galilei had returned to Florence by the time construction started and it seems the Irish architect Edward Lovett Pearce then revised the plans and designed the wings.
Thanks in part to Conolly, Pearce (whose father was Vanbrughõs cousin) became the architect of Irelandõs outstanding Palladian-inspired Houses of Parliament. There are three surviving drawings by Pearce for Castletown: a ground-floor plan, a sketch plan for Ñor ofñthe entrance hall ( Fig 2) and an elevation of the main external cornice for the pavilions. Conolly may have sent Pearce to Italy for inspiration, as he was there in 1724 and in touch with Galilei. Historians Giles Worsley and David Griffin have both suggested that the surveyor-general Sir Thomas Burgh may also have been involved.
The philosopher George Berkeley, an intimate of Lord Burlington in London Ñwho had seen the work of the Ancients himself in Rome and Sicily and visited the major cities of the north of Italy in 1717Ñalso gave advice. In July 1722, Berkeley wrote enthusiastically to Sir John Perceval, Ôthe most remarkable thing now going on is a house of Mr Conollyõs at Castletowné It is to be of fine wrought stone, harder and better coloured than the Portland, with out- houses joining to it by colonnades, &c. The plan is chiefly of Mr Conollyõs invention, however, in some points he has been pleased to consult meõ.
Berkeley noted in a following letter that Ôthe building is begun and the cellar floor arched before they have agreed on any plan for the elevation or fa•ade. Several have been made by several hands, but as I do not approve of a work conceived by many heads so I have made no draught of mine own. All I do being to give my opinion on any point, when consultedõ. Historian Edward Chaney has suggested that the curved colonnades at Castletown may even be a result of Berkeleyõs enthusiasm for Berniniõs colonnades at St Peterõs in Rome.
The son of an innkeeper, William Conolly rose to immense power and wealth
Perceval wrote that he was ‘glad for the honour of my country that Mr. Conolly has undertaken so magnificent a pile of building, and your advice has been taken’. He urged the use of materials from Ireland (woods, stone, furniture, everything down to the lock plates), ‘since this house will be the finest Ireland ever saw, and by your description fit for a Prince, I would have it as it were the epitome of the Kingdom, and all the natural rarities she afford[s] should have a place there’.
Perceval’s mindset must have accorded with Connolly’s, as the paler stone is from Edenderry, the darker locally quarried. Inside, even the tapestries were of Irish manufacture. It is apt that this ‘epitome of the Kingdom’ should today be a showcase of Irish conservation and culture.
The bold, double-height entrance hall (attributed to Pearce) is cleverly arranged, full of light, facing south, with a first-floor gallery. This becomes an axial corridor, running above an equivalent intersecting corridor on the raised ground floor. This arrangement is somewhat reminiscent of the halls in houses by Vanbrugh (who famously had to explain to the Duchess of Marlborough what a corridor was). The unusual, splayed piers and pilasters of the gallery level carry carved wooden capitals in the form of flower-filled baskets painted to look like plaster.
Lovett Pearce’s one surviving floorplan suggests a circular staircase was intended, but none was completed in the 1720s. Secondary staircases at either end of the house gave access to the upper storeys, which included suites of wainscoted rooms, the end rooms with corner fireplaces (then a little old-fashioned in England). There was one large picture gallery.
William died childless in 1729, but his wife, Katherine, lived until 1752—in 1740, she had the great obelisk-like Conolly Folly built as a monument to her husband, to designs by Richard Castle ( Fig 6). Mrs Delany recalled Katherine’s habits: ‘She rose constantly at eight, and by eleven was seated in her drawing room, and received visits to three o’clock, at which hour she punctually dined, and generally had two tables of eight or ten people each.’
The house passed to William’s oldest nephew, also called William, who, with his wife, Lady Anne ( née Wentworth), ran the estate during Katherine’s widowhood. It was inherited soon after by his son Thomas. Four years later, in 1758, Thomas married Lady Louisa, a daughter of the 2nd Duke of Richmond, and, together, they began to change Castletown’s interiors.
One of their first acts was to add the great staircase ( Fig 3). The Portlandstone treads and brass balusters, dated 1760, were supplied by Anthony King of Dublin. The flowing Rococo plasterwork decoration is by the stuccadore
Philip Lafranchini, from the Ticino region. The magnificent decorative scheme includes relief portraits of Thomas, Louisa and her Lennox siblings (including the 3rd Duke of Richmond).
Louisaõs brother-in-law, the Earl of Kildare (Duke of Leinster from 1766), persuaded Louisa to adapt rather than rebuild. Ceilings and chimneypieces in new drawing rooms on the north front and the dining room created from two rooms on the south front bear close comparison with those designed by Isaac Ware for Lord Kildareõs town house, Kildare (later Leinster) House.
The first-floor picture gallery ( Fig 7) was remodelled in 1760, initially with advice from William Chambers, with the work executed by Simon Vierpyl, who also oversaw the new staircase. The Gallery was further decorated, during the 1770s, with schemes drawn from the publications of dõhancarville and Montfaucon and engravings of Raphaelõs decorations of the Vatican loggia (painted by Charles Reuben Riley). The three Murano chandeliers were apparently supplied directly to Castletown.
Busts of poets and historians still stand on carved brackets along the south wall; between the windows were originally cases for books, china or curiosities. It was treated as a living/ drawing room: Ôlord Harcourt was writing, some of us played at whist, others at billiards, Mrs Gardiner at the harpsichord, others at chess, others at reading and supper at one end. I have seldom seen twenty people in a room so easily disposed of.õ
Lady Louisaõs decorative instincts can be seen particularly in the ground-floor Print Room ( Fig 5), which is the work of her own hands and a unique Irish survival of this fashion. In 1768, she wrote: Ôall this finishing work is so very entertaining, I am as busy as a bee, and that you know is mighty pleasant.õ
Something of that joy and industry is discernible among those who care for and champion this house today and will surely be felt by all who visit. Acknowledgement: David Griffin For further information, visit www.castletown.ie