Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

www.adams.ie 27 William Ashford (Fig. 6) painter of this pair of views was born in Birmingham and christened in St Martin’s parish church on 20 May 1746. 27 At the age of about eighteen, however, he moved to Ireland, taking the position of clerk to the comptroller of the laboratory section of the Ord- nance Office in Dublin Castle, which he held until 1788. Apart from occasional visits to England and Wales, it was in Ireland that Ashford spent his lifetime. He became Dub- lin’s most successful landscape painter of the late eight- eenth and early nineteenth centuries, succeeding Thomas Roberts who died prematurely in 1777. 28 In 1767, aged twenty-one, Ashford submitted his first works to the Society of Artists in Ireland, an organisation of artists who had constructed an octagonal exhibition room for annual displays in William Street, a move which galvanized art production in Ireland. 29 Ashford’s early exhibits were not in the landscape genre for which he is almost exclusively known today. Instead he showed two still-lifes, both titled A Group of Flowers . A work of this ti- tle, dated 1766, survives in the National Gallery of Ireland and is likely to be one of these exhibits. 30 Over the follow- ing years Ashford exhibited subjects including dead game, fruit and A Trout from Nature . It was only in 1772 that land- scapes, both topographical and demesne, appeared in the exhibitions and hereafter Ashford spent his entire long ca- reer painting the Irish landscape in all its manifestations. On Roberts’s death in Lisbon, where he had sought res- pite for his consumption, Ashford completed his rival’s great set of views of Carton, County Kildare, with two rather different pictures. 31 Clearly in favour with the ducal FitzGeralds, he won another important early commission for a pair of views of their ancestral home at Maynooth Castle which he exhibited in William Street in 1780 (Fig. 7). Ashford also contributed to Thomas Milton’s engraved views of Irish seats including portrayals of Belan, Coun- ty Kildare (1783), Bessborough, County Kilkenny (1785) WILLIAM ASHFORD ‘The foremost landscape painter of his time in Ireland’ Fig. 7 William Ashford (1746-1824) A view of Maynooth Castle, county Kildare (exhibited 1780) private collection