Important Irish Art
,
wednesday !"th May !#$% at &pm
49
38
Patrick Tuohy RHA (1894-1930)
A Portrait of Lord Fingal, half length, seated
in hunting attire
Oil on canvas, 95 x 74cm (37" x 29”)
Signed
Exhibited: Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 1924,
Cat. No. 18
!is evocative portrait of a benign and moustachi-
oed gentleman, seated, wearing a hunting coat of
the Meath Foxhounds, is redolent of that patrician
and tolerant society so well preserved in the pages of
Somerville and Ross. Arthur Plunkett (1859-1929)
the 11th Earl of Fingall was the senior peer of a fam-
ily that were ancient Lords of the Pale: Dunsany of
Dunsany Castle and Lowth of Louth Hall.!e story
is told how the Dunsany Plunketts conformed to the
established church to protect their Catholic kins-
mens’ land, through the Penal Laws; a trust that was
never broken.
Lord Fingall led an ornamental life as State Steward
in Dublin Castle (with an interlude of adventure as
a yeomanry volunteer in the Boer War). He married
a horse-mad woman from County Galway. In her
memoirs of 1937 ‘Seventy Years Young’, she describes
a life of hunting and hunt balls, her husband always
referred to as ‘Fingall’. Her account of sitting up with
the family jewellery awaiting the fate of Kileen Castle,
having received in the night a laconic message from
their neighbour, Sir John Dillon, (“Dear Fingall,!ey
are burning my house and say they are going on to
you. I thought I had better let you know”), is as good
a vignette as any of the end of the Anglo-Irish world.
!e Earldom ceased with the death of their son,
Oliver, well remembered in County Meath, and the
barony of 1403, has reverted to the Dunsany’s.
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