Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

Most early depictions of Dublin take their viewpoint from a point close to the north bank of the River Liffey a little to the west of the city. This preference was noted in an account of a visitor in the summer of 1797: ‘the most eli- gible [view] is that which presents itself from the Phoenix Park.’ 3 Indeed, the merits of this perspective had been recognised long before this as, exactly a century earlier, this was the view selected in a 1698 drawing by Francis Place (1647- 1728) in the National Gallery of Ireland. 4 It is also the view- point in an almost contemporary oil attributed to Thomas Bate (active c. 1692-99) (No. 1 Royal Crescent Bath) and, perhaps most impressively, in a large oil including the mag- azine fort and Royal Hospital by Joseph Tudor (d. 1759) (private collection). William Ashford also painted a view of Dublin from this angle, in an important canvas showing the city from Chapelizod commissioned by the Lord Lieuten- ant, the Marquess Camden (Fig. 3). 5 The favoured vantage point from the west ref lected the fact that Dublin’s centre of gravity was located – much more so then than now – upriver from the sea, close to the site of the Norse settlement and the area around the two cathe- drals. Writing in 1778 the Rev Thomas Campbell noted the rather obvious reason why the view from the east was not favoured: ‘the city is not seen to advantage from the wa- ter’. 6 By contrast, when painting from the west the deer of the Phoenix Park provided a pastoral motif, exploited by both Ashford and Tudor, while the prominently sited Royal Hospital on the other side of the river presented one of the city’s most notable public buildings in splendid isolation to anchor any view taken from this angle. If, as has been suggested, the inclusion of the Royal Hos- pital and the magazine fort – almost inevitable from this viewpoint – makes reference ‘to Ireland’s colonial status’ and conveys ‘not so much a landscape of reaction as a landscape per- manently under surveillance’ , this seems to have been lost on all eighteenth-century visitors and the attraction from this angle was repeatedly described in wholly visual terms. 7 Thomas Campbell stated quite simply, anticipating the words of the 1797 visitor, ‘the best view of [Dublin] that I have had from its environs, was from the Phoenix Park’. 8 ‘The Most Eligible View’ ? ORIENTING DUBLIN Fig 3 William Ashford (1746-1824) A view of Dublin from Chapelizod (1795-98) Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland