Henry O'Neill (1798 - 1880)  'View of St. Brigid’s Cathedr...

Hammer

€560

Henry O'Neill (1798 - 1880) 

'View of St. Brigid’s Cathedral, Kildare, prior to its restoration c. 1835,'  watercolour on paper, Signed (bottom lower left), in contemporary gilt frame, 26cms x 36cms (10 1/2" x 14").

Depicting the Cathedral of St. Brigid in Kildare, this watercolour by Henry O’Neill, painted around 1835, is a valuable record of the building prior to its restoration four decades later. Not far from the cathedral stands the round tower, and beside the tower a broken high cross—all elements of this medieval Christian site that survive today. By the time O’Neill depicted the cathedral, the building was roofless and essentially a ruin. In 1875, under the supervision of architect George Edmund Street, restoration work began. The work included a new roof, north transept, chancel and west wall. The square tower at the crossing of nave and aisles was also rebuilt. O’Neill’s watercolour shows the cathedral as it appeared prior to 1875, with its roofless nave and south transept. The viewpoint is from the south, and shows the south wall of the nave with six lancet windows. During Street’s restoration, these windows were recessed within new Gothic arches, built to link and reinforce the wall buttresses visible in the watercolour. There is no sign of the west gable in his view, although it does appear in a late eighteenth-century watercolour in the Beranger Collection in UCD, where it can be seen to be in an advanced state of collapse. In George Petrie’s view of Kildare Cathedral, published in 1820 in Thomas Cromwell’s Excursions in Ireland, the gable wall has completely collapsed. Like Petrie, O’Neill produced illustrations for William Frederick Wakeman’s 1835 guidebook Picturesque sketches of . . scenery of Ireland, and also for his Fourteen Views of the County of Wicklow, published that same year. As well as being an artist, O’Neill was a teacher; his manual for art students was published by George Rowney in 1846. He was also an antiquarian, and in 1857 published his most important work, illustrating the ancient high crosses of Ireland. A controversialist, his 1863 his Fine Arts of Ancient Ireland, illustrated by G. Hanlon, set out to refute conclusions reached by Petrie in the latter’s Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland. While Petrie established, after careful scientific study, that the round towers of Ireland were built during the Christian era, many antiquarians, including Henry O’Brien, Charles Vallencey and O’Neill, preferred to believe they were older buildings, built for fire worship or as Zoroastrian temples.
Dr. Peter Murray, 2022