Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

www.adams.ie William Ashford 1746-1824 25 companied her text (Fig. 5) an unorthodox view- point ‘ from a house in the north strand’ as it ‘presents a dif ferent view of the bay from any hitherto given to the public’. 23 In addition to its scenic beauties, for some at least the bay, site of departures into exile and joyful home- comings, evoked associational, or emotive, qualities. In Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee of 1812, the hero Lord Colambre was moved, as many have been since, by the visual drama of arrival by boat into Dublin Bay. As ‘the sun shone bright on the Wicklow mountains [h]e admired, he exaulted in the beauty of the prospect; and all the early associations of his childhood, and the patriotic hopes of his riper years, swelled his heart as he approached the shores of his native land’. 24 Passing references can be as informative as breathless set-piece descriptions by visitors such as Twiss and Campbell, or purple passages by authors like Edge- worth as to how deeply aesthetic judgments permeate society and – indeed as Celtic Tiger examples illus- trate – sometimes nothing can be more revealing of popular taste than an estate agent’s sales pitch. When the lease of a house on Mecklenburgh Street was to be auctioned in July 1779, selling points in its favour included the fact that it ‘commanded a beautiful prospect of the bay, Hill of Howth [and] the harbour of Dublin’. 25 In the decade then that Ashford painted the present pair of landscapes, Dublin Bay had come into its own as one of the great views of Ireland, and possibly Eu- rope. Indeed, the anonymous 1797 visitor went so far as to characterise it, with a forgiveable touch of hyperbole, as ‘one of the most delightful and picturesque scenes in the world’ . Given the fact that views of the Bay of Naples in all media were among the most popular souvenirs from the Grand Tour (and, as noted below, several sets by leading artists were brought back to Ireland), it is surprising that it took so long for the artistic po- tential of Dublin Bay to be appreciated. Leonardo di Mauro notes that generally the Bay of Naples ‘was depicted in a rather monotonous way’, by contrast when Ashford took Dublin Bay as his subject he approached it in an innovative and inventive manner. 26 Fig. 5 Mr ‘C’, A View in the Bay of Dublin taken from a house in the North strand (1816) Taken from Anne Plumptre’s Narrative of a Residence in Ireland (1817)