Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

and Ballyfin, County Laois (Fig. 9) (1787) 32 . In the years after about 1780 Ashford’s style broadens somewhat and when a group of his works was offered in 1794, his sty- listic progression could be assumed as public knowledge with the advertisement referring to ‘two landscapes in his first style’. 33 Ashford continued to produce exceptional work in the following decades, noticeably the Charleville Forest series of 1801 (Fig. 8), which illustrates a full understanding of Picturesque theory as it had been codified by William Gil- pin (1724-1804) and others in the previous decades. When the Charleville pictures were exhibited in the former Par- liament House on College Green in 1801 an anonymous diarist was full of praise: ‘There is here abundant scope for an exertion of the artist’s genius in the delineation of foliage. The articulation is perfect and the colouring so beautifully rich, and various, that I could with pleasure have spent hours in viewing them’. 34 Also among his 1801 exhibits was a View of the bay of Dublin from the lighthouse, an intriguing sounding work which does not seem to have survived. 35 In addition to demesne landscapes and Dublin views, Ash- ford painted a few landscapes with literary narratives such as Jacques contemplating the wounded stag , a subject taken from Shakespeare’s As you like it (private collection). One of his most famous works, selected for the cover of Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin’s The Painters of Ireland (1978), shows tourists in search of the antiquarian pictur- esque exploring the ruins of Cloghoughter Castle, County Cavan (Fig. 10). 36 Over the course of his long life, Ashford grew rich and painted less, but increasingly became one of the key cul- tural figures in Dublin in the early decades of the nine- teenth century. Already in 1801 the anonymous diarist de- scribed him as ‘decidedly the first landscape painter’, and it is difficult to cavil at Strickland’s assessment that his ‘pictures justify the reputation he enjoyed as the foremost landscape painter of his time in Ireland’. 37 Fig. 8 William Ashford (1746-1824) The river in the demesne at Charleville Forest, county Offaly (1801) Courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland