Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

In time, Ashford followed the spread of the city eastwards along the southern shore of the bay, moving to Sandy- mount, just a little further along the coast from Ringsend which he shows in his view towards the Wicklow Moun- tains. In or about 1792, he built a villa to designs by his friend James Gandon, architect of the Custom House, on a site provided to him ‘on very moderate terms’ by ‘ his noble friend Viscount Fitzwilliam, the lord of the soil’. 38 The symbolic link with two of the individuals most responsible for the move of the city eastwards could not be more stark. Gan- don’s son noted that Ashford’s new dwelling was ‘a residence more suitable to the habits and taste of a landscape painter’ and Ashford’s move to Sandymount has quite reasonably been associated with his interest in painting the bay. 39 Howev- er, the present pair of views, among his very finest works and the most important views of Dublin Bay ever to have been painted, date from well before his move to salubri- ous Sandymount and instead were painted in his studio in the heart of the Georgian city, though evidently detailed preparatory sketches were made on the spot. Clearly his interest in the subject was of longstanding duration and he painted it throughout his career. It is almost tempting to hypothesise that – like Francis Danby (1793-1861) in the next generation – Ashford was a keen sailor, or at least enjoyed messing around in boats. While, it must be said, there is no evidence for this, it is clear that like the city itself he was increasingly being drawn to the sea. Sometimes Ashford includes the bay as a distant view, a pleasing band of sunlit turquoise on the horizon, set off by a foreground cast into shadow. Inevitably, given his subject matter, which is about two miles distant from the coast, this is the case in his series of works on canvas and paper showing the suburban estate of the Viscounts Fitzwilliam at Mount Merrion. Perched high on a hill, their villa of- fered outstanding, but distant, views across the bay to Howth (Fig. 11). Ashford approaches closer to the coast – and sea level – in his View of the Royal Charter School , Clontarf of 1794 (Fig. 12), a work of unusual composition, townscape on the left, seascape on the right. Ashford’s masterly handling of nature here, and of the bay’s particu- lar atmospherics, many of which qualities are shared with the present pair of paintings, have been described by Nico- la Figgis and Brendan Rooney: ‘the sureness with which Ash- ford managed to represent the familiar Irish climate is one of the painting’s great qualities. Ashford creates a synthesis between the architecture and the blustery bay into which it faces’. 40 Ashford rather unusually also took for his subject the development of the infrastructure which rendered safer the perils of the bay to shipping in his Opening of the Ringsend Docks, 23 April 1796 (Fig. 13). ‘His representation of water... is exquisite’ WILLIAM ASHFORD AND DUBLIN BAY Fig. 11 William Ashford (1746-1824) A view from the north terrace, Mount Merrion, county Dublin courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge