Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

www.adams.ie William Ashford 1746-1824 33 Written accounts hint at the difficulties of capturing Dub- lin Bay on a single canvas and explain why Ashford painted what is perhaps best looked as a diptych, rather than a pair of paintings. Lady Morgan noted the changeability of the weather and how it effects perception of the landscape: ‘The springing up of a contrary wind kept us for a considerable time beating about this enchanting coast: the weather suddenly changed, the rain poured in torrents, a storm arose, and the beau- tiful prospect which had fascinated our gaze, vanished in mists of impenetrable obscurity’. 42 Between the two paintings, Ash- ford captures the sense familiar to local mariners of more than one weather pattern being simultaneously visible in the bay. Plumptre acutely noted a further potential difficulty that Ashford overcomes – relative size and distance: ‘when the extent of the bay is considered, it must appear obvious that the bolder features of the landscape alone can be very distinguishable’ and that to ‘obtain an accurate idea of the minuter, it would be necessary to coast [sail] around it’. 43 Seemingly alive to this issue, Ashford captures detail and expanse equally well – the bold and the ‘minuter’ features of the landscape. In- deed, this is one of the greatest strengths of the paintings and the anonymous diarist who reviewed Ashford exhibits in the former parliament house, including it will be re- membered a Dublin Bay view, drew attention to just this point: ‘ his productions are large…, yet finished with the most minute exactness’. 44 On occasion, painters seeking topographical accuracy sacri- fice artistic effect – the big picture – and a certain dryness can creep in. This is certainly not the case here. While the topography is scrupulously depicted down to the lev- el of individual buildings, the paintings cohere admirably as works of art. This is the case when they are viewed as individual paintings but is even more so when they are considered, as they demand to be, as a carefully conceived single work of art on two canvasses. The twinned paint- ings present a study in contrasts, in, for example, the por- trayal of the water – choppy in the view looking north and calm in its pendant – and also in temporal and at- mospheric effects. In addition to capturing the changeable climactic conditions, the contrasting viewpoints remind anyone who has sailed in Dublin Bay of the rapidly chang- ing topography as a boat tacks around, of how a view of Howth is quickly succeeded by a prospect of the Wicklow Mountains. A visitor towards the end of the century, almost as if aware of the disparity between written accounts and painted views of the subject, explicitly threw out a challenge for an artist to capture the subject. It presents a long range of diversified mountains, enriched by a multiplicity of beautiful demesnes, which, when thus bespangled with the beams of the morning sun, cannot be delineated with equal beauty by the pencil of the most scientific artist. 45 Ashford here comes as close as any artist before or since in rising to this formidable challenge.