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

82 importantly, it recorded a Dublin address. The ‘ Blessington Commode ’ is unique, and its history lost. Stewart lived in Henrietta Street and possessed the great mansion house at Blessington. But he had vacated Henrietta Street before his earldom was created and Blessington was burnt in the 1798 rising. The ‘ Blessington Commode ’ keeps many secrets, but Kirkhoffer would surely have made others like it and most probably they are adrift some- where, their Dublin origins unrecognised. As it stands the ‘Blessington Commode’ is the most important piece of Irish mid-18th century in- laid furniture extant. Literature: Glin & Peill, Irish Furniture , Yale University Press, London & New Haven (2007) p 57-58, illustrated fig 65 and 66; Knight of Glin, Irish Arts Review, Vol. 13 (1997) The Stewarts of Ramelton whose arms are inlaid on the ‘Blessington Commode’ The Stewarts of Ramelton were ‘undertakers’ of the plantation of Ulster on vast tracts of land stolen from the indigenous land owners. This wealth, combined with successful military careers, gave them a baronetcy in 1623 and in 1682 they became Viscounts Mountjoy. Mean- while the Boyles through lucrative advance- ments in political and ecclesiastical circles in Dublin had accumulated substantial wealth and built a great mansion on their acquired estates at Blessington, Co. Wicklow. Through the marriage of 2nd Viscount Mountjoy, to Anne Boyle, the daughter and heiress to Mur- rough Boyle, Viscount Blesinton (sic) the Stew- arts added the Boyle wealth to that of their own. Their son William Stewart, 3rd Viscount Mountjoy had lived between London and a family estate at Silchester in Hampshire but in 1733 returned to Ireland and married Eleanor FitzGerald of County Cork. They were record- ed as one of Dublin’s most fashionable cou- ples amongst the tight-kinit inter-related soci- ety that centred on Henrietta Street. Stewart also took an active role in the intellectual and commercial life of the capital. He backed the Theatre Royal in Aungier Street, subscribed to the Dublin booksellers, became Grand Master of the Masonic Order and an early member of the Dublin Society (later RDS). This society promoted agriculture and industry and Stew- art was keen to forward the family linen and trading businesses at Ramelton. It is reasona- ble to assume that he would have been, with his exposure to continental tastes and a mem- ber of The Society of Dilettanti, familiar with the cabinet making workshop of John Kirkhof- fer. Perhaps the commode was an unfinished commission and although he had left Dublin by 1745, the new Earl of Blesinton may have ordered that his elevation be recorded in the splendid armorial ‘achievement’ that we see on the ‘Blessington Commode’. To no avail, his two sons predeceased him and the earl- dom was extinguished on his death in 1769. A new Earldom of Blessington was created for his relatives, the Gardiner family, but this too only lasted one generation and now only the ‘Blessington Commode’ stands as a record of a fleeting and blazing constellation of social aspiration and grandeur.