Country House Collections at Slane Castle October 12
th
& 13
th
2014
299
768
DANIEL MACDONALD (1821-1853)
The Eagle’s Nest, Killarney
Oil on canvas, 67 x 62.5cm
Signed and inscribed “Cork 1841”
The Eagle’s Nest:
The lakes of Killarney were identified in the 18th century by the followers of the ‘picaresque’ as a desired destination to experience the sublime and a
tourist industry flourished.
Among the attractions were the remarkable echoes that could be got by the firing of the cannon. A guidebook of 1852 described the effect “The report
produced a discordant crash, as if the whole pile of rocks were rent asunder, and the succeeding echoes resemble a tremendous peal of thunder. Twelve
reverberations, and sometimes more, may be distinctly counted and what appears extraordinary, after the sound has been totally lost, it occasionally
revives, becomes louder and louder and then dies away”.
Arthur Young in, A Tour in Ireland 1780, wrote “At that noble rock (The Eagle’s Nest), fired three cannon for the echo which indeed is prodigious; the
report does not consist of direct reverberation from one rock to another with a pause between, but has an exact resemblance to a peal of thunder rattling
behind the rock as if travelling the whole scenery we had viewed, and lost in the immensity of MacGillicuddy’s Reeks”.
A variation of a cannon discharge, the bugle call, was immortalised by Alfred Tennyson
“Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying // Blow, bugle: answer,
echoes, dying, dying, dying!”
Other artists depicted this scene, in particular, Jonathan Fisher (N.G.I.), Thomas Walmsley and Bartholomew Colles Watkins.
€6000 - 10,000
