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This the seventh annual auction by Adam’s at Slane Castle where the decorative arts and stuff from country houses can be
displayed in a sympathetic setting. It does not have a theme centred on one house or one family but rather it is a gathering
together of threads spun at random and woven into a picture of Ireland by grubby auctioneers. The tattered garment is nat-
urally of many colours, orange and green, but also imperial crimson, the rich browns of old mahogany, the jewels of Harry
Clarke and of course, the black stuff.
Arthur Guinness II presides over the proceedings in his magisterial portrait by Cregan and in his own person encapsulating
the complications of Ireland. This family which succumbed to an avalanche of English titles came from the most Gaelic of the
Ulster tribes. Although the brewery in Dublin was at one stage the largest in the world and its logo the symbol of the harp,
the Earls of Iveagh landed themselves in an immense estate in Norfolk and their sumptuous bequest “to the nation” was to
England. (Actually when you see how Kenwood is treasured and looked after, compared to Russborough, didn’t he do the
sensible thing?) Of course the Guinness family was generous to a fault to Ireland and restored St. Patrick’s Cathedral, donat-
ed St. Stephen’s Green and undertook practical housing in place of the desperate slum conditions of much of Dublin. It’s just
when you compare them to their real peers, the Jacobsens of Copenhagen and how that city benefits to this day from their
endowments, one can only be wistful.
We have Jonathan Swift in a first edition of Gulliver’s Travels where never was human folly so surgically dissected and the
objects of his rage, the selling of Irish places and peerages to English stooges represented in this sale by the Viscount and
Viscountess Barrington of Ardglass and Barons of Newcastle, Co. Dublin who had no connection to Ireland but whose father
had bought an Irish peerage from George I, in spite of being removed from the Westminster parliament for corruption.
Still most people for most of the time lived domestic lives. The better off furnished their houses comfortably, hung pictures
and portraits, acquired bookcases to hold their books. Jonah Barrington (1760-1834, another embezzler of the name, but no
relation) leaves us a picture of a country house with mahogany furniture, hunt tables, dining chairs (some broken), sporting
pictures, dogs, sofas with stuffing showing underneath, whips, saddles in the hall beneath an ancient set of antlers and ro-
bust oak furniture that could take anything thrown at it. In town the ladies were taking tea or playing cards on little tables,
perhaps a William Moore of Dublin pier table and a mirror by the Booker Brothers introducing a note of fashion.
In the nineteenth century domesticity triumphed; novelties like inlaid Killarney furniture were popular. The sterner and more
aesthetic perhaps, might have preferred the ‘truth’ and solidity of furnishings designed by Pugin. They would have brought
back photographs from the early days of photography showing accurate depictions of “natives” to astonish – best whilst seat-
ed on elaborate Victorian cast-iron garden seats in an age when there were certainly longer and more scent filled summer
evenings than there are now.
It is all here, make of it what you will, and because our forbearers knew what made life covenable and interesting what they
have left us is very liveable with, particularly if imaginatively fused with modernity.
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COUNTRY HOUSE COLLECTIONS AT SLANE CASTLE 2015