Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

www.adams.ie William Ashford 1746-1824 21 Over the course of the century Dublin was also portrayed from the north as in a further drawing by Francis Place (c. 1699, Rhode Island School of Design) and by Ashford him- self in another work painted for Camden, showing the city from Clontarf, with a glimpse of the bay in the middle dis- tance (Fig. 4). Indeed, almost exactly contemporaneously, Jonathan Fisher in his Scenery of Ireland of 1795 noted the attractions that the view presented, uniting as it did the urban and maritime: ‘the approach to the City of Dublin from the north and north-west, has the advantage of comprising in the one view the city and the bay’. 9 In time, the building of the Georgian squares expanded the city eastwards and away from its old core. Large-scale land reclamation, the embankment of the Liffey and the creation of a harbour at the South Bull Wall were further factors in the fundamental shift in Dublin’s relationship with the sea. 10 It was not, however, until the completion of James Gandon’s new Custom House in 1791 and Carlisle (now O’Connell) Bridge three years later that the city really be- gan to spread east to connect with Dublin Bay. 11 This trans- formation was nicely summed up in a newspaper report at the time: Since the building of the New Custom-House, more especially since the idea of a new bridge went abroad, a new town has risen and is still rising in the North East vicinity of the city…. The Gardiner estate on the north side of the river, the greater part of which was within the last twenty years an [sic] universal cabbage garden, is now covered with superb streets. Elegant mansions seem to vegetate and propagate there, like the former produce of the soil. 12 If the Gardiner estate was the beneficiary on the northside, Finola O’Kane has shown how the Fitzwilliam family who owned much of the land east of the city on the southside, was instrumental in this pivot of Dublin’s axis: ‘with their expanded developments at Ringsend, Ballsbridge…and Merrion Square, the Fitzwilliam family ef fectively caused Dublin’s land- scape to swivel eastward’. 13 She further notes that ‘Dublin’s spa- tial turn to the sea’ reversed the pattern of London or Paris in that the eastern parts of the city – close to the docks – became the favoured abode of the wealthy. 14 The Fitzwilliams’ own residence at Mount Merrion was further east again and offered magnificent view of Dublin Bay looking towards Howth which Ashford was to record in a series of oils and drawings (c. 1806, Fitzwilliam Muse- um, Cambridge) and it is surely not coincidental that it was Ashford, a close friend of Viscount Fitzwilliam, who was the first artist to explore in detail the beauties of Dublin’s coastal landscape. Fig. 4 William Ashford (1746-1824) A view of Dublin from Clontarf (1795-98) Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland