Adam's IRISH OLD MASTERS 5th November 2024

Irish Old Masters| 5 November 2024 www.adams.ie 37 in the same year Blaquiere was given the post of park bailiff. Among Cooley’s early works were designs for the Public Law Offices in 1776, in which the Lord Lieutenant, Earl Harcourt and Blaquiere were closely involved. The drawings reveal the extent of the building as enlarged and remodelled for Blaquiere, the original four-roomed lodge, like - ly sharing the seventeenth century origins of the park, now sub - sumed into the core of a compact villa in fashionable neo-clas- sical style, its sophistication expressed in the handsome, well balanced proportions and restrained details. The existing four-bay, two storey block was essentially enlarged with neat single-storey wings, each set back slightly with a cornice and blocking course concealing a hipped roof, and with a large tripartite or Wyatt window set in a shallow, segmental-headed relieving arch. The western eastern wing was given a deeper plan to accommodate new entrance, formed as a variation on the theme of a Venetian window, with a pretty fanlit doorcase flanked by narrow sidelights. The appearance of the main front, with the design and arrangement of the wings is especially interesting because it anticipates James Gandon’s important villa design for Emsworth, Malahide, made almost two decades later, and more significantly perhaps seems to have provided a model for Francis Johnston’s highly accomplished villa at Galtrim in Meath of c.1802, and unexecuted design of 1808 for a lodge for the Private Secretary in the Viceregal demesne. Johnston, who in 1776 as a 16-year old had been sent from Armagh to Dublin to train in Cooley’s office by Primate Richard Robinson and would eventually be appointed Architect and Inspector of Civil Buildings in 1801, was evidently very familiar with Blaquiere’s lodge, even if by 1803 the building had already been radically altered by the addition of bowed fronts to the wings, linked by a glazed colonnade which continues to dominate the south, garden front. One distinctive aspect of Blaquiere’s building before alteration was the provision of a rooftop conservatory, shown in the draw- ing above the flat roof of this wing, representing an unusual feature with few camparisons in this period. Internally, the neat formality of the main front gives way to a less coherent plan, its somewhat sprawling irregularity obviously explained by the absence of a basement and the constraints of an older plan. Notable is the wine cellar, located off the main stair, its size and prominence of within the plan giving some credence to the claimmade in 1782 that Blaquiere was ‘very hospitable. Has a good cook and good wines and knows their influence’. Whether or not Cooley was involved, it remains unclear whether de Blaquiere’s alterations to the old baliff ’s lodge were undertaken in a personal, rather than official capacity, for although he succeeded in having been granted some £8,000 from the public purse towards the building, the canny former Chief Secretary (one of whose successors, William Eden, had complained in 1780 that ‘Confinement in the Castle air will soon destroy both me and my family’) sold the lodge to the government in 1782 for £7,000, to serve as the official resi - dence of the Chief Secretary. Sir John Blaquiere, who continued to serve as Bailiff until 1789, settled permanently in Ireland having already married a wealthy heiress, Eleanor Dobson, this marriage and the profits of his sinecures allowing him financial independence, with estates in Westmeath and Cavan. Made a Knight of the Bath in 1774, and granted a baronetcy in 1784, he remained a member of Parliament until raised to the peerage as Baron de Blac - quiere at the Act of Union. Kevin V. Mulligan