Adam's Important Irish Art Wednesday May 30th 2018

22 13 JAMES MAHONY ARHA (1810-1879) The Official Opening of ‘The National Exhibition of the Arts, Manufactures and Products of Ireland’, Cork, 1852 Watercolour, 74 x 66cm (29 x 26’’) Provenance: Private Collection, Belfast This large watercolour by James Mahony depicts the building designed by John Benson for the “National Exhibition of the Arts, Manufactures, and Products of Ireland” held in Cork in 1852. The exhibition took place on the Corn Exchange site on Albert Quay—where City Hall now stands—and was opened by the Lord Lieutenant, Archibald Montgomerie, 13th Earl of Elginton, on June 10th of that year. The watercolour depicts a long line of eminent citizens, waiting to be introduced to the Lord Lieutenant, who stands on a carpeted dais in the foreground. A tipstaff announces the names of those who are to as- cend the steps to the dais; they appear to be mainly men, while the audience looking on from both sides is composed mainly of women. First in line is a man, hat in hand, wearing a blue sash and medallion. Galleries on either side of the hall are also packed with spectators. Benson was a brilliant engineer and architect, who used innovative building methods; the roof of the Cork Exhibition hall, with its four transepts, was constructed of laminated wood trusses, bent into semi-circles, and linked together to form a strong but light structure. Large skylights admitted light into the building. The same system was used in his designs for other Cork buildings, including the Butter Market, the Firkin Crane and the English Market. Following on from his success in Cork, Benson was engaged to design the buildings for the Dublin International Exhibition in 1853. Unfortunately, being constructed mainly of wood, over the years all of Benson’s Cork buildings have been destroyed, or have lost their original truss roofs, as a result of fire. When the Cork National Exhibition ended, the building was dismantled and sold to the trustees of the Royal Cork Institution. Three years later it was re-erected, on a site beside the Cork School of Art (now the Crawford Art Gallery). Titled “The Atheneaeum”, it was inaugurated by the Lord Lieutenant, George Frederick Howard, Earl of Carlisle, and over the following decades was used mainly for lectures, exhibitions and performances. Re-named the Cork Opera House in 1877, it hosted many theatrical and opera perfor- mances before being destroyed by fire in 1955. Mahony’s watercolour depicts the first inauguration of the building in 1852. He depicts an ornate but functional interior, one that combined conventional architectural elements, including Corinthian columns, with proto-Modernist construction methods. When the building was re-erected as the Athenaeum three years later, it was a simpler structure, and by the time it was remodelled as the Cork Opera House in the later nineteenth century, it had lost most of its original embellishments. A contemporary wood engraving by Mahony, published in The Illustrated London News, shows another transept in the Cork Exhibition complex, the Fine Arts Hall. Peter Murray, April 2018 Further information on this work is available in the on-line catalogue € 4,000 - 6,000