William Ashford (1746 - 1824) Figures by the Temple in the ...

Estimate

€80,000 - €120,000

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 Demesnes, 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) passim 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 drawings. 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 magnificent library of book, prints, and other productions 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 97 the French dancer Mademoiselle Zacharie and, rather more unusually, had, it has been suggested crypto-Catholic leanings. Fitzwilliam was himself an accomplished artist and founder of the museum in Cambridge which bears his name to which he bequeathed six of Ashford’s oil paintings of Mount Merrion in addition to the album of drawings. At least one further example from the series is preserved at Wilton, in Wiltshire, home to the Earls of Pembroke who inherited the Fitzwilliam estate from the 7th Viscount. Here Ashford paints a summerhouse or teahouse in the form of a classical temple cited to avail of the spectacular views that Mount Merrion afforded. The painting is close in general composition to one of the set in the Fitzwilliam Museum though with numerous differences in the charmingly configured figures and animals which animate the foreground which is further enlivened by the dappled fall of sunlight. The view of Dublin in the distance is captured with great dexterity and it was for this view that Mount Merrion was famed. In November 1761 George Montague wrote to Horace Walpole on the view from this spot, and seems to have been one of the earliest to make what would become a very hackneyed comparison: ‘Nothing near Naples can be more beautiful, with such a view of the sea…as would make your Thames blush for Richmond Hill and Isleworth… such ships, such mountains, such as [the] hill of Hothe [sic] as makes one not wish for any other embellishments’. Ashford was a resident of the area overlooked by Mount Merrion. In, or about, 1782 he had moved from College Green in the city centre to Sandymount (‘a residence more suitable to the habits and taste of a landscape painter’) and commissioned his friend, the great architect James Gandon, to build a villa on a plot leased from Fitzwilliam. Finola O’Kane characterizes the Mount Merrion commission as ‘among the most significant of all the demesne landscape series in the Irish tradition, deftly describing Dublin’s late Georgian landscape at a time when it was veering to the east and moving inexorably towards the sea’. William Ashford was born in Birmingham and christened in St Martin’s parish church on 20 May 1746. At the age of about eighteen, however, he moved to Ireland, taking the position of clerk to the comptroller of the laboratory section of the Ordnance Office in Dublin Castle, which he held until 1788. Apart from occasional visits to England and Wales, it was in Ireland that Ashford spent his lifetime. He became Dublin’s most successful landscape painter of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, succeeding Thomas Roberts who died prematurely in 1777. In 1767, aged twenty-one, Ashford submitted his first works to the Society of Artists in Ireland, an organisation of artists who had constructed an octagonal exhibition room for annual displays in William Street, a move which galvanized art production in Ireland. Ashford’s early exhibits were not in the landscape genre for which he is almost exclusively known today. Instead he showed two still-lifes, both titled A Group of Flowers. A work of this title, dated 1766, survives in the National Gallery of Ireland and is likely to be one of these exhibits. Over the following years Ashford exhibited subjects including dead game, fruit and A Trout from Nature. It was only in 1772 that landscapes, both topographical and demesne, appeared in the exhibitions and hereafter Ashford spent his entire long career painting the Irish landscape in all its manifestations. On Roberts’s death in Lisbon, where he had sought respite for the consumption which afflicted him, Ashford completed his rival’s great set of views of Carton, County Kildare, with two rather different pictures. Clearly in favour with the ducal Fitzgeralds, he won another important early commission for a pair of views of their ancestral home at Maynooth Castle which he exhibited in William Street in 1780. Ashford also contributed to Thomas Milton’s engraved views of Irish seats including portrayals of Belan, County Kildare (1783), Bessborough, County Kilkenny (1785) and Ballyfin, County Laois (1787). In the years after 1780 Ashford’s style broadens somewhat and when a group of his works was offered for sale in 1794, his stylistic progression could be assumed as public knowledge with the advertisement referring to ‘two landscapes in his first style’. Ashford continued to produce exceptional work in the following decades, noticeably the Charleville Forest series of 1801, which illustrates a full understanding of Picturesque theory as it had been codified by William Gilpin (1724-1804) and others in the previous decades. When the Charleville pictures were exhibited in the former Parliament House on College Green in 1801 an anonymous diarist was full of praise: ‘There is here abundant scope for an exertion of the artist’s genius in the delineation of foliage. The articulation is perfect and the colouring so beautifully rich, and various, that I could with pleasure have spent hours in viewing them’. In addition to demesne landscapes and topographical views, notable among them a magnificent pair showing Dublin Bay looking north and south (Adam’s, 1 June 2022), Ashford painted a few landscapes with literary narratives, such as Jacques contemplating the wounded stag, a subject taken from Shakespeare’s As You Like It (private collection). One of his most famous works, selected for the cover of Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin’s The Painters of Ireland (1978), shows tourists in search of the antiquarian picturesque exploring the ruins of Cloghoughter Castle, County Cavan. Over the course of his long life, Ashford grew rich and painted less, but increasingly became one of the key cultural figures in Dublin in the early decades of the nineteenth. Already in 1801 the anonymous diarist described him as ‘decidedly the first landscape painter’, and it is difficult to cavil at Strickland’s assessment that his ‘pictures justify the reputation he enjoyed as the foremost landscape painter of his time in Ireland’.