Adam's Country House Collections Day II - 10th October 2023

54 367 THOMAS ROBERTS (1748-1777) The Salmon Leap at Leixlip Oil on canvas, 41.5 x 61.5cm Provenance: with Cynthia O’Connor Gallery, Dublin; Private collection, Dublin Exhibited: possibly the picture exhibited at the Society of Artists in Ireland in 1772, No. 60, a View of the Salm- on-Leap at Leixlip ; Thomas Roberts, 1748-1777 , National Gallery of Ireland, 2009, No. 38 Literature: William Laffan and Brendan Rooney, Thomas Roberts, Landscape and Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Tralee, 2009) pp. 185-87 € 30,000 - 50,000 In the tragically short span of his career, Rob- erts produced a body of consistently accom- plished, gently lyrical work that justifies his title of the finest Irish landscape painter of the eigh - teenth century (AAI, Vol. 2, p. 425). Among his exhibits in the 1772 exhibition in the Society of Artists Great Room in Dublin’s [South] William Street was an painting, very likely the present work, showing the celebrated salmon-leap at Leixlip. In the 1772 exhibition, Roberts’s pic- ture appeared alongside three of Roberts’s views of nearby Lucan house and demesne. A landmark, just eight Irish miles from Dub- lin, the salmon-leap was particularly popular with day-trippers from the capital, and was recorded by several artists and writers in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rob- erts’s fellow artist John O’Keefe provided the following description of the spot: It is a custom of the Dublin people to go to Leix- lip, and see what is called the salmon-leap. I often went, and stood upon the bridge, looking into Lady Mazarene’s gardens, through which the Liffey runs. The rise is about twelve feet; when the salmon gets to the bottom of the cat- aract, it takes its tail in its mouth, gives a spring and leap, and throws itself into the upper part of the waters: in this surprising action it was only a few yards from me. When in the upper waters, it swims on, and you neither see nor know anything more about it. The landscape painter William Jones had paint- ed the salmon-leap at Leixlip as early as 1745, and dedicated Giles Smith’s engraving after his painting to the Right Hon. William Conolly of Leixlip Castle. However, perhaps the most significant artist to have visited the landmark before Roberts was George Barret, who ex- ecuted at least one fine watercolour of the salmon-leap. The beauty spot remained pop- ular into the nineteenth century, when it was depicted with varying degrees of success and accuracy by, among others, William Howis and William Henry Bartlett. The salmon-leap was submerged in 1947 when the Leixlip dam and reservoir were built. Roberts’s view of the tumultuous cascade es- chews the Claudean tradition that had exer- cised a profound influence over Irish landscape painters, including Roberts himself, for over a century. The composition is notably horizon- tal, and does not the feature the recessional planes that traditionally gave depth and bal- ance to classical landscapes. Instead, the com- position anticipates the empirical essays of nineteenth-century artists. In tone, detail and finish, however, it is typical of Roberts’s work. Indeed, it anticipates the artist’s later dramatic landscapes featuring landstorms and similar phenomena, in which Roberts explored the irresistible effects of nature. Roberts did not consider the salmon-leap at Leixlip a place to which visitors came to sit and contemplate, as they did in the artist’s views of the weir at Lu- can, but rather one that inspired caution and awe in equal measure. This is communicated by the gentleman who escorts two elegant la-