Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 4 DECEMBER 2024

98 44 WILLIAM ASHFORD (1746 - 1824) Figures by the Temple in the Park at Mount Merrion, Co. Dublin, with Dublin and Dublin Bay in the background Oil on canvas, 91.4 x 128.3 (36 x 50½’’) Provenance: Christie’s 17 April 1964 (lot 46); Collection of Desmond Guinness; Christie’s 15 July 1983 (lot 25); Collection of the Hon. Francis D. Murnaghan Jr., thence by descent. Literature: Edward Malins and the Knight of Glin, Lost De- mesnes, Irish Landscape Gardening 1660-1845 (London. 1976) p. 105, fig 116; Anne Crookshank, ‘A Life Devoted to Landscape Painting, William Ashford (c. 1746-1824)’, Irish Arts Review Yearbook (1995) p. 128, no. 45; Finola O’Kane, William Ashford’s Mount Merrion: The Absent Point of View (Tralee, 2012) € 80,000 - 120,000 Situated on an elevated site to the southeast of the Dublin, Mount Merrion, the suburban retreat of the Viscounts Fitzwilliam, was a comparatively small demesne but it overlooked the 2,700 acre estate of the family which stretched from Merrion Square to Bray. Between 1804 and 1806 Ashford painted for the Fitzwilliams what has been termed his ‘last great commission of estate views’ (O’Kane, op. cit.), a series of oils and an album of twenty-four draw- ings. Ashford’s patron, the 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam (1745-1816), was described by a contemporary as a ‘great encourager of the Fine Arts [who] was very liberal to those whose merits be appreciated’, among whom was the miniaturist Horace Hone, in whose London house the viscount lodged, and Ashford himself who was on friendly, as much as professional, terms with his patron. At his English home near Windsor, Fitzwilliam assembled ‘a mag- nificent library of book, prints, and other produc- tions connected with the fine arts’. A somewhat idiosyncratic member of the Irish House of Lords with ‘a more complex life than is initially apparent’ (ibid.), he did not marry but had three children with Hon . F r an c i s D . Mu r naghan J r. Co l l e c t i on