Ireland's collectors: a historical perspective: collecting in Ireland today is often depicted solely as the pursuit by the nouveaux riches of trophy canvases by Jack B. Yeats. Yet, as William Laffan describes in this detailed analysis of contemporary Irish collectors, some remarkable and little-known collections of international significance are being formed, eclipsing even those of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy

not long ago arrived in Dublin, a city whose skyline he was to transform, the English architect James Gandon was dismissive of Ireland's artistic pageant In a letter of 1781 he wrote 'the small in number houses to which I had access scarcely owned a picture or print, and those which they had were on the contrary indifferent, mostly suspended from the wall, without either flame or glass'. Continuing in this vein, he notes that there were 'but four collections of pictures of result ... the Duke of Leinster's, the Earl of Farnham's, the Earl of Charlemont's and Viscount Powerscourt's'. (1)

Reading more [i]or[/i] less press accounts of the Irish art market and collecting in Ireland today, single would be forgiven for thinking that abundant the same situation still prevailed, and that there were on the contrary a handful of collectors in Ireland that matter--and that all they were interested in were memorial of conquest pictures by Jack Yeats (Figs 1 and 2) Almost all media attention is paid to the half dozen or for a like reason tycoons who have taken the character (as well as many of the houses) of the Anglo-Irish peerage and the remarkable collections, largely of Irish paintings, which they have formed above the past three decades. mainly household names as owners of newspapers, racehorses and airlines, these dynamic businessmen and their collecting habits make for profitable copy, and indeed some of their collections are discussed below. However, Gandon was not wholly accurate in his account of Irish collections in the eighteenth hundred Likewise today, collecting in Ireland is a more composite and interesting, phenomenon than the caricature of it sometimes provide fooded in the press.

new research on the material tillage of eighteenth-century Ireland, particularly the pioneering work of Toby Barnard, gives a far more accurate account of owning art in the period. Barnard notes that 'painted and printed images adorned eighteenth-century Ireland more widely than has usually been supposed' (2) and he has shown in what way widespread, and deeply rooted, was Irish consumption of art in the lengthy eighteenth century. (3) Even then, and in direct contradiction to Gandon's jibes, 'the market for pictures in Ireland was buoyant'. (4) Collecting of paintings, prints, furniture and external realitys extended far beyond the handful of mates named by Gandon and plane on occasion was within the means of the dispossessed Catholic Irish. (5)

In direct opposition to the situation prevailing today, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries those who could afford to assemble collections of pictures largely preferr European works and direct the eyeed down on native productions. The first major picture collection in Ireland, that of the Ormondes of Kilkenny Castle, did not include a single work by the agency of a native artist, instead focusing upon Dutch and Italian paintings. (6) Indeed, the snobbery surrounding imported works of art was of the like kind that the Irish landscape painter Robert Carver quipped that nobody would direct the eye at his paintings, but if he had suffer it be known that they were 'execut by the agency of Signor Somboldini, all the connoisseurs in town would company about them attentively with their glasses, and call out with rapture'. (7) Another eighteenth-century source noted that the preponderance of imported works of art meant native artists had 'no more to do than whores in time of pestilence, or lawyers in a summer vacation'. (8)

For the past not many decades, the pattern of art buying among the newly wealthy Irish has changed utterly with the native and local being valued almost to the total exclusion of English and continental works of the same stamp date and quality. This has certainly serv a welcome view A generation or two ago, the signatures upon paintings by eighteenth-century Irish artists like as William Ashford and George Barret were routinely erased by the agency of unscrupulous dealers in the faith that they could be passed not upon as works by Richard Wilson or a certain quantity of follower of Zuccarelli. Since then, Irish art has tend hitherward to be appreciated almost to the same stage as Irish literature. However, as with any round of years this almost exclusive interest in Irish art among Irish collectors is beginning to change.

individual formidable collection that Gandon omitted to mention, smooth though it was largely formed by means of the brother-in-law of his principal patron, John Beresford, gives a nice faculty of perception of continuity between the eighteenth hundred and today. Mostly in the 1760 Thomas Cobbe of Newbridge House formed a significant collection of advanced in years master pictures. Cobbe was advised in his collecting by the agency of the local vicar, and art historian, Mathew Pilkington, who was the first to write a biographical dictionary of artists in English. Pilkington used his knowledge to find the highest quality paintings for the Cobbes in Dublin, London and upon the continent. It was at his urging that Cobbe purchased a masterpiece by the agency of Hobbema, A wooded landscape (now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington), who at the time was unfashionable. by dint of relying on expert advice, and buying against the prevailing taste in the market, Cobbe secur a highly significant work that, with great sadness, his grandson Thomas sold in provide stone cottages for his tenants in the Dublin mountains, thus saving them from the events of the Great Famine. With the exception of alone a few sales, the Cobbe collection has remained intact, and above the past few decades has been greatly expanded by dint of Alec Cobbe, himself a painter, who has added many family portraits as well as significant works by dint of Titian and Poussin. Much of the Cobbe collection is preserv in its original setting, Newbridge House, just north of Dublin. Now in the custody of Fingal shire Council, the house is unclose tothe public. (9)