Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

www.adams.ie William Ashford 1746-1824 41 Half a century after painting these youthful masterpiec- es, Ashford died at his home, Sandymount Park, on 17 April 1824 and was buried in Donnybrook churchyard. His family, however, continued their associatiation with the area into which the city was expanding along the bay’s southeastern coast. His son, Daniel, an amateur artist, lived in Ballsbridge, while his grandson, and namesake, William, was a much-loved doctor and pharmacist after whose death in 1892 a pillar was erected at Irishtown ‘ in commemoration of his services for a half a century to the poor of the parish’ . After the 1776 sale Ashford’s pair of Dublin Bay views disappeared from sight, or at least from the art historical record. When they were sold next in 23 July 1887 (again at Christie’s) they were described as the work of ‘Monamy’ or Peter Monamy (1681-1749). 68 However, the catalogu- ing convention of the time, in not giving a first name for the artist, indicates a degree of scepticim about the ac- curacy of the attribution and implies that Monamy was being used as a generic shorthand for a marine work. In the 1887 sale the identificaion of the topography as Dublin Bay was also lost and they were described simply as being coastal scenes. 69 As part of ongoing research into the art of William Ashford, it is pleasing to re-establish the correct identity of these major works and publish them here for the first time under his name. Later artists have shown less reluctance than their eight- eenth-century colleagues in painting Dublin Bay. Wil- liam Sadler, for example, made the subject matter of the Pigeon House his own while Andrew Nicholl subverted topographical conventions by including views of the bay peaking out from behind his well-known banks of wild f lowers. Meanwhile, at Howth and Malahide Nathaniel Hone, extracted poetry from the most simple combina- tions of sea, sky and shoreline while Norah McGuinness explored the bay’s more prosacially humdrum – and in- dustrial – qualities in a series of original works. However, no artist has captured with such profound understanding the atmospherics of Dublin Bay and its highly mobile to- pography as does Ashford here, and it is pleasing that al- most two hundred and fifty years after the pictures were first sold in London these extraordinary works are back in Dublin where they were painted. CODA