Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

36 Forest) he created one of the most perfect combinations in Ireland of landscape, architecture and classical sculpture, focused on the mausoleum built for his first wife to a de- sign by James Wyatt (1746-1813) and with a monument by Joseph Wilton (1722-1803). In addition to acquiring a portrait of his house from Ash- ford, and it seems other views of the estate which have not been identified, Dawson commissioned six views of Dawson Grove from the young Thomas Roberts. 53 It is an intriguing possibility that the novelty of Ashford’s pair of Dublin views was inf luenced by his and Dawson’s expe- rience of demesne landscape painting in which a series of multiple views was the norm. It took Roberts six different views to capture the highly changeable lacustrine land- scape of Dawson Grove: ‘somehow the essence of Dartrey could only be captured in series’. 54 Four views was common in sets of Irish demesnes, as in Roberts’s Lucan quartet (c. 1772, National Gallery of Ireland), while a direct comparison can be made between the pair of paintings Ashford made of Maynooth Castle and the Dublin Bay pair. We are in the unusually fortunate position of being able to hear Ashford articulate his reaction to the landscape at Dawson Grove almost in his own words and at very close to the moment when he painted his Dublin Bay views. The Rev Burrows, tutor to a Dawson nephew, kept a manuscript diary of his visit to Ireland in 1773 and on his last day at Dawson Grove recorded his admiration for its ‘striking beauties’: For wood, water and simple unaf fected decorations, it far exceeds any thing my imagination could have formed. Mr Ashwood [sic] who is here to take some views of it, told me he could employ him- self many years in painting the variety of its beauties, since every ten yards af fords a new and pleasing landscape, and the horizon is every way bounded by such a fine wavy line of mountains, which come forward, retire backwards, or loose themselves in the clouds, in a thousand agreeable figures. 55 Ashford clearly articulates here a sense of the active mo- bility of the Monaghan lake landscape which encouraged him, and Roberts, to paint serially. He faced a very similar challenge shortly afterwards when he painted the present works. Fig. 17 William Ashford (1746-1824) A View of Dawson Grove, Co. Monaghan (c.1774) Private collection