'A glimpse of the sublime': Inside the drawing room of the 'grandest Palladian house in Ireland'

ear, work was completed to the restoration of a 1750s drawing room in one of Ireland’s most celebrated Georgian country houses. The re-creation of the original picture hang and decoration within this important interior was made possible by a combination of rediscoveries, scientific investigation and research. It offers a remarkable — and in some points unexpected — window into the tastes of the period. Alec Cobbe, who has overseen this project, has published a short account of the work, The Vernet Drawing Room (2024), to which this article is indebted.

Russborough House was built by Joseph Leeson, Viscount Russborough from 1760 and 1st Earl of Milltown from 1763 (Country Life, June 10, 2009). Leeson was the son of a Dublin brewer and property developer, who entered into an estimated fortune of £50,000 at the age of 30 in 1741. About a year later, he purchased the Russeltown estate — which became Russborough — about 20 miles south of Dublin, and began a new house on the grandest scale (Fig 1). Frustratingly, almost nothing about the construction of the house is documented.

Leeson’s architect is thought to have been Richard Castle (possibly working with gentleman amateur Francis Bindon), the son of an English-born Jew called Joseph Riccardo, who became director of Munitions and Mines to Friedrich Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Castle himself seems to have travelled in Europe as a military engineer and had settled in Ireland by 1728, becoming assistant to Edward Lovett Pearce, a distant cousin of Vanbrugh and latterly surveyor-general.

Both Pearce and Castle were enthusiasts for the compact and symmetrical villa designs popularised in Britain by the 16th-century Vincentine, Andrea Palladio, in his architectural treatise I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura. Castle’s design for Russborough is perhaps the grandest and most coherently expressed Palladian house in Ireland, but one that formalises distinctive aesthetic preferences seen in other recent Irish buildings. It is, for example, exceptionally broad, the relatively low built central block, which contains all the principal rooms, forming the centrepiece of a frontage massively elongated by curving wings and flanking courts to a prodigious 700ft.

With work to the new building under way, Leeson set off on the Grand Tour, visiting Florence and Rome in 1744-45. He purchased art and sculpture with notable enthusiasm, not only commissioning one of the first — and best — Grand Tourist portraits from Pompeo Batoni, but also ordering a copy of Salvator Rosa’s history painting The Death of Regulus (1650-52), from a French artist resident in Rome, Claude-Joseph Vernet. The two men were possibly introduced through Vernet’s wife from 1745, Virginia Parker, a daughter of an Irish captain in the papal fleet.

Born in the papal enclave of Avignon into a family of artists in 1714, Vernet had moved to Rome in the 1730s, where he established a reputation as a landscape painter. Working largely for diplomats and Grand Tourists, his views were variously topographical or imagined, but always Italianate. The bulk of his output was produced in pairs or groups of four and presented extreme contrasts of weather, light and surface. Because they invited comparison, they came to enjoy the reputation of appealing to connoisseurs of the Sublime aesthetic. Leeson’s commission of a subject painting was slightly unusual, therefore, and may have had a political resonance: Regulus was a stoic and Leeson an Irish MP.

These paintings all came back to Russborough, happily missing an earlier shipment of purchases that was described in a letter to Horace Walpole as comprising ‘£60,000 worth of goods, and many statues, pictures etc.’ and was seized by the French. Presumably, all these things were destined to find a place in the new house, but it’s not clear whether any detailed plans existed for their display. Nor is it clear how far work to the building had progressed during Leeson’s absence. The assumption, however, is that work to the interiors was under way by the late 1740s.

Certainly, developed plans for one internal scheme must explain another order for paintings placed by Leeson’s agent in Rome, Robert Wood, on December 5, 1749. Vernet’s order book notes ‘four oval paintings, four English feet wide and three feet and eight and a half inches high, depicting marine subjects and the four times of the day’ were promised ‘a year and a half afterwards’. This was much more familiar Vernet subject matter, but, to judge from other entries in the same volume, the oval shape was unusual and the dimensions unparalleled. The agreed price for the commission was 300 silver ecus.

By the time Leeson placed the order, he must already have been preparing to return to Rome because he was back in the city with his son by Easter 1750. Vernet may then have been pressed to complete the commission early, because all the marine views at Russborough are signed and dated 1750. Presumably, Leeson wanted to take the pictures home with him. Whatever the case, Vernet records receipt of payment in 1751 and the two men were certainly still in the city in January that year and remained to be depicted in Reynolds’s Parody of Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’.

It must have been on a visit to Vernet’s studio early in 1751 that Leeson’s eye was caught by ongoing commissions for other patrons that the artist either would not — or could not — sell (probably because of his weight of work). The artist’s principal assistant, Charles-François Grenier de Lacroix, however, obliged with copies of two additional pairs of his master’s pictures, both contrasting morning and evening light to different, but standard sizes. Quite independently and in similarly undocumented circumstances, Leeson acquired a copy of a much-admired 1630s painting by Guercino, The Triumph of David.

Meanwhile, back in Ireland, Castle died suddenly on February 29, 1751. The loss of his disciplined oversight might help explain a change in the character of the rich, internal plasterwork at Russborough. The saloon, for example, has decoration that reinforces the architectural logic of the space and compares stylistically to the documented work of the Ticinese stuccadores Paolo and Filippo Lanfranchini, who worked elsewhere with Castle. In the main stair, by contrast, the ornament is applied with a magnificent disregard for architectural propriety.

These two bodies of work are conventionally dated to the late 1740s and 1750s respectively and — although more ordered than the staircase decoration — it’s to the latter that the drawing-room plasterwork belongs stylistically. Moreover, as we will see, it so perfectly accommodates the paintings Leeson purchased in Rome in 1751 that it can’t have been completed before his return to Ireland. Even so, the likelihood must be that the executed interior is an evolution of a scheme planned and possibly partially executed from 1749, when the four Vernets were first ordered.

Russborough’s drawing room opens directly off the entrance hall. In Palladian fashion, it is rectangular in plan, lit to one side by two windows and heated on the opposite wall by a centrally placed fireplace of marble (Fig 2). The doors and low dado panelling are of highly prized mahogany. A deep ceiling cove is visually demarcated from the walls by a heavy cornice. Ceiling, cove and cornice are all richly ornamented with decorative plasterwork, as are the walls beneath them (Fig 3).

Flanking the fireplace and to either end of the room are large roundels of plaster that encircle the four Vernets, each clearly made for the other. If the seascapes were intended to appear as trompe l’oeil views out of the room, however, the roundels are placed too high for the viewpoint they offer. It’s an unexpected disjunction, possibly evidence that the plasterwork was made to correspond to the dimensions of the roundels before the paintings themselves arrived. A fifth and larger roundel, probably for a mirror, is placed between the windows.

The end walls are also decorated with pairs of festoons that terminate with double trails of foliage. On one side of the room, these trails correspond to the doors and — in the restored arrangement — on the other side, they relate to the larger pair of Lacroix paintings. There are smaller festoons with single trails of foliage to either extreme of the window wall. Suspended below these are the smaller Lacroix copies. The arrangement is not only very tidy visually, but corresponds exactly to what we can reconstruct of the original hang.

To explain this, it is necessary to describe what is known of the subsequent history of the paintings. In 1785, a reward was offered for information regarding malicious damage done to a Vernet in the house with a knife. Nothing is otherwise known about this incident, but the recent conservation work identified the cut. The house survived the tumultuous events of the 1798 Irish Rebellion and, in the first decade of the 19th century, the smallest pair of Lacroix paintings were given away to a family friend, the Countess of Leitrim.

Significantly, that loss was not noted in a catalogue of paintings at Russborough published by J. P. Neale in his Views of the seats of noblemen and gentlemen (1826). Instead, he describes the drawing room as hung with eight Vernets (an understandable confusion) and the copy of the Guercino. One explanation for this is that Neale was publishing an old list without having visited the house. A black-and-white photograph of the 1860s shows two of the Vernets and one of the larger Lacroix paintings in their present position. It clearly shows an off-white ceiling, light walls and two-tone gilding of the plasterwork.

In 1902, the Countess of Milltown bequeathed most of the contents of Russborough to the National Gallery of Ireland, including the copy of Guercino in its spectacular 18th-century frame. The Vernets remained as fixtures until they were sold or stolen in the 1920s, possibly during the Irish Civil War. Curiously, the larger Lacroix pair survived at Russborough until the contents were auctioned off in 1952 as part of the sale of the property to the collectors Sir Alfred and Lady Beit. By this date, all that remained of the room’s original decoration was its repainted plasterwork.

The reassembly of the drawing room was effectively begun by the Beits, who recovered the Vernets from an American collection in 1968. They established the Alfred Beit Foundation in 1976 to open and protect Russborough and its contents, and then the Apollo Foundation in 1984, which promotes the Fine Arts in Ireland. The latter has actively supported the restoration, purchasing the two smaller Lacroix paintings given to Lady Leitrim in a sale at Killadoon, Co Kildare, in 2020. These remain in their original frames, an important point of reference for the new gilding work. Two years later, one of the larger Lacroix appeared in Yorkshire and another suitable alternative was bought to form its pair (the location of the original remains unknown).

In the light of these acquisitions, the decision was taken to restore the room in August 2022. A report by Catherine Hassall revealed that the two-tone gilding — the darker effect created using copper granules — was a primary finish (Fig 4). There is no obvious 18th-century parallel for this colouration. The balance of wall and ceiling tones were matched from the 1860s photograph, the artworks cleaned, the frames re-gilded and the Guercino copy in its astonishing frame loaned back to the house. Today, this interior not only allows the visitor to step into an 18th-century drawing room, but to catch a glimpse, through its paintings, of the Sublime.

Visit www.russborough.ie to find out more about the house