View of the staircase from the foyer entryway. Note the Eyre coat of arms
A shortened version of this article appeared in “The Journal of the Galway Archaeological & Historical Society,” Vol. 69 (2016), pp. 161-190.
William Randolph Hearst & The Eyrecourt Staircase
By James Charles Roy
Roughly ten miles south from the obscure East Galway town of Eyrecourt, off the Portumna Road, stand the well preserved remains of Derryhivenny Castle, constructed by one Daniel O’Madden in 1643, as a date chiseled into one of its remaining corbel stones tells us. Derryhivenny is not, in reality, a castle, but a fortified tower house, the likes of which form one of the most common relics of the Tudor and early Stuart eras in Ireland, representing as it does the unsettled times through which a man like O’Madden had to navigate. A landowner of considerable local stature, he sought from his home what others of his rank shared in common, a measure of protection from the turbulence that lay just outside his gated walls, as opposed to comfort.[1] A bare twenty years later, however, the Protestant Colonel John Eyre, a Cromwellian officer feasting on the spoils of military triumph, constructed his own “castle,” which he grandly christened Eyrecourt Castle. Despite the sometimes tenuous hold that English forces exercised over the countryside, and especially those lands west of the Shannon, Eyre evidently held a sanguine eye for the future. He constructed for himself and family (on lands once dominated by the aforementioned O’Maddens) a house built for pleasure. Instead of a high stone tower with narrow embrasures which barely passed as windows, and castellated ramparts from which inhabitants under siege could throw or shoot projectiles on enemies below, Eyrecourt Castle was a three-storey mansion without any pretense of a military function. Light, airy, grand rooms – salons, a drawing room, a formal audience hall – all illuminated by fifty large windows, none protected by bars or iron grates, were centered around one overwhelming architectural oddity, the grandest, most formal stairway ever yet constructed in the west of Ireland.
Some idea as to the extraordinary nature of Eyre’s conception is the fact that this carefully contrived element occupied one-third of the entire house. There is no functionality to the design; no house or domestic dwelling requires that a staircase be so all consuming of its available space, if in fact the desire is utility. At Eyrecourt, the stairway was intended to make a statement: it conveyed power, ownership, pride, permanence, and sovereignty, none of these idle conceits. It seemed to say that battles, civil war, and discord were things of the past, that the political situation had been settled. Instead of military decorations, in fact, carvings of shields, swords, flags, cannon and the like, which were featured in contemporary examples in England such as Ham House in Richmond, Col. Eyre decided that more mundane decorative embellishments to this architectural statement be incorporated, such as bowls of fruit and acanthus leaves sprouting from the mouths of gargoyles.[2]
The entryway to the ground floor foyer was equally sumptuous, two oversized double-hung oak doors surrounded by six sleek pillars, richly carved, enclosing an oval window embrasure, itself surmounted by a rectangular frame, also highly ornamented, all protected by an overhanging portico with complicated molding. Inside the frame was carved the inscription, “Welcome to the House of Liberty,” an enigmatic slogan that confused the preacher John Wesley, who visited Eyrecourt on several occasions. “Does it mean liberty from sin?” he jotted in his journal.[3]
Entering the house through a small entry “box” (to protect the hall from gusting winds) Wesley, among others, would have seen, firstly, a large elaborately carved representation of the Eyre coat of arms; and then, in all its glory, two monumental sets of stairs on either side of the hallway, each leading to a pair of landings, the second of which would then turn 180 degrees and form a single flight of final stairs via yet another landing.
The objective for all who climbed this great staircase was the piano nobile, Italian for “noble floor,” the highlight of which was the main reception room where guests (or supplicants) could be greeted with some ceremony amid splendid surroundings, there to be entertained (or threatened as the case might be); in other words, the most important chamber in the house. As befits this status, it was guarded at Eyrecourt by an impressive set of doors flanked on either side by columns and then floor-to-ceiling panels stretching across the entire breadth of the stairwell. Overlooking the entire ensemble was a multi-paneled plaster ceiling, elaborately fashioned. It would appear that the exoticism of Florence, Ferrara, Lucca, Verona, and all the important Renaissance Italian cities, and in particular Venice, offered too many examples for English architects to ignore.[4] The lower floors were less emphasized, their role in daily life that of the ordinary such as bedrooms, offices, breakfast rooms and so forth. Usually, but not in the case of Eyrecourt, the windows of the piano nobile were large and more ornate than those of other floors.
Everywhere were carvings: noble pillars supporting the main mid-level “turnaround,” eighteen full dimensional fruit and flower bowls set atop the newel posts, with twelve half profiles inserted in the walls; and instead of simple balustrades connecting the hand railings with the floor of each riser, complicated panels with swirling decorative flourishes. At the top of the stairs, its richly carved doors and doorframes were seconded by wainscoting panels lining every other available piece of space on the walls. This ensemble of carefully designed and integrated elements would be worthy of any grand house in England. Given the setting here, an insignificant town in a backward and provincial Ireland where, according to Petty’s survey of 1672, four out of five dwellings in the country lacked a chimney (Eyrecourt had four), this installation beggars belief.[5] It also defies easy explanation.
William Randolph Hearst & The Eyrecourt Staircase
By James Charles Roy
Roughly ten miles south from the obscure East Galway town of Eyrecourt, off the Portumna Road, stand the well preserved remains of Derryhivenny Castle, constructed by one Daniel O’Madden in 1643, as a date chiseled into one of its remaining corbel stones tells us. Derryhivenny is not, in reality, a castle, but a fortified tower house, the likes of which form one of the most common relics of the Tudor and early Stuart eras in Ireland, representing as it does the unsettled times through which a man like O’Madden had to navigate. A landowner of considerable local stature, he sought from his home what others of his rank shared in common, a measure of protection from the turbulence that lay just outside his gated walls, as opposed to comfort.[1] A bare twenty years later, however, the Protestant Colonel John Eyre, a Cromwellian officer feasting on the spoils of military triumph, constructed his own “castle,” which he grandly christened Eyrecourt Castle. Despite the sometimes tenuous hold that English forces exercised over the countryside, and especially those lands west of the Shannon, Eyre evidently held a sanguine eye for the future. He constructed for himself and family (on lands once dominated by the aforementioned O’Maddens) a house built for pleasure. Instead of a high stone tower with narrow embrasures which barely passed as windows, and castellated ramparts from which inhabitants under siege could throw or shoot projectiles on enemies below, Eyrecourt Castle was a three-storey mansion without any pretense of a military function. Light, airy, grand rooms – salons, a drawing room, a formal audience hall – all illuminated by fifty large windows, none protected by bars or iron grates, were centered around one overwhelming architectural oddity, the grandest, most formal stairway ever yet constructed in the west of Ireland.
Some idea as to the extraordinary nature of Eyre’s conception is the fact that this carefully contrived element occupied one-third of the entire house. There is no functionality to the design; no house or domestic dwelling requires that a staircase be so all consuming of its available space, if in fact the desire is utility. At Eyrecourt, the stairway was intended to make a statement: it conveyed power, ownership, pride, permanence, and sovereignty, none of these idle conceits. It seemed to say that battles, civil war, and discord were things of the past, that the political situation had been settled. Instead of military decorations, in fact, carvings of shields, swords, flags, cannon and the like, which were featured in contemporary examples in England such as Ham House in Richmond, Col. Eyre decided that more mundane decorative embellishments to this architectural statement be incorporated, such as bowls of fruit and acanthus leaves sprouting from the mouths of gargoyles.[2]
The entryway to the ground floor foyer was equally sumptuous, two oversized double-hung oak doors surrounded by six sleek pillars, richly carved, enclosing an oval window embrasure, itself surmounted by a rectangular frame, also highly ornamented, all protected by an overhanging portico with complicated molding. Inside the frame was carved the inscription, “Welcome to the House of Liberty,” an enigmatic slogan that confused the preacher John Wesley, who visited Eyrecourt on several occasions. “Does it mean liberty from sin?” he jotted in his journal.[3]
Entering the house through a small entry “box” (to protect the hall from gusting winds) Wesley, among others, would have seen, firstly, a large elaborately carved representation of the Eyre coat of arms; and then, in all its glory, two monumental sets of stairs on either side of the hallway, each leading to a pair of landings, the second of which would then turn 180 degrees and form a single flight of final stairs via yet another landing.
The objective for all who climbed this great staircase was the piano nobile, Italian for “noble floor,” the highlight of which was the main reception room where guests (or supplicants) could be greeted with some ceremony amid splendid surroundings, there to be entertained (or threatened as the case might be); in other words, the most important chamber in the house. As befits this status, it was guarded at Eyrecourt by an impressive set of doors flanked on either side by columns and then floor-to-ceiling panels stretching across the entire breadth of the stairwell. Overlooking the entire ensemble was a multi-paneled plaster ceiling, elaborately fashioned. It would appear that the exoticism of Florence, Ferrara, Lucca, Verona, and all the important Renaissance Italian cities, and in particular Venice, offered too many examples for English architects to ignore.[4] The lower floors were less emphasized, their role in daily life that of the ordinary such as bedrooms, offices, breakfast rooms and so forth. Usually, but not in the case of Eyrecourt, the windows of the piano nobile were large and more ornate than those of other floors.
Everywhere were carvings: noble pillars supporting the main mid-level “turnaround,” eighteen full dimensional fruit and flower bowls set atop the newel posts, with twelve half profiles inserted in the walls; and instead of simple balustrades connecting the hand railings with the floor of each riser, complicated panels with swirling decorative flourishes. At the top of the stairs, its richly carved doors and doorframes were seconded by wainscoting panels lining every other available piece of space on the walls. This ensemble of carefully designed and integrated elements would be worthy of any grand house in England. Given the setting here, an insignificant town in a backward and provincial Ireland where, according to Petty’s survey of 1672, four out of five dwellings in the country lacked a chimney (Eyrecourt had four), this installation beggars belief.[5] It also defies easy explanation.
View of the “piano nobile” from the second landing. Note the plaster ceiling.
Whose idea was it to pursue such a complicated design, Col. Eyre’s, a professional soldier and then politician, or his wife, a woman with a French Huguenot background and, perhaps, social ambition? Whom did they hire to come up with the plan, some itinerant foreigner recommended by someone else (surely not a local “architect”)? Where did the carvers come from? Probably not from the local population, although the notion of apprentices from the area is not farfetched, given Ireland’s long history of superior stone carvers. Were these craftsmen English, Dutch, Flemish, French or Italian? Hints and suggestive leads exist, to be sure, but definitive answers are likely to elude us.
Along with these series of question marks, and contributing to the sense of irony that envelopes much of Eyrecourt’s long story, how did it happen that this singular creation has, for nearly one hundred years, sat disassembled in dozens of crates and, since 1951, been parked in a storage facility in suburban Detroit, Michigan? How did fate decree this, and what does its future hold?
The Eyre Family
It is intriguing to ruminate at the sense of optimism that a man such as Col. Eyre must have entertained to go through a building project of this sort and at this particular time in Ireland’s history. He had come to the island as a veteran of Cromwell’s New Model Army; he had lived through the uncertainties of civil war, the execution of a king, the varying and day-by-day switching of allegiances that the rush of political affairs often forced on its participants, followed by the return of the Stuarts who had what on their minds? Revenge, perhaps, the desire to see those punished who had cut off the head of a duly anointed monarch, the urge to strip those of uncertain loyalty of their lands, titles, wealth, and even lives. What possessed John Eyre to build anything other than a fortress, a stronghold, a redoubt surrounded by walls, instead of what he did commission, an open great house with windows, light and air, in a demesne or park without fortified gates or defensive works? This cannot logically be explained. Whose side would he have been on, for example, had he lived for another five years to 1690, when William of Orange came to Ireland to grapple with another divine right king, James II (undoubtedly William, one would suppose, but surprises always raise their heads during confusing times such as these; James Fitz James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond, a Protestant and a combatant for the Willamette forces at the Boyne, was attainted for treason in 1715 for his involvement in Catholic Jacobite conspiracies, so stranger things have happened).[6]
The events of Col. Eyre’s career have been capably treated in this journal, and do not require repeating in detail here.[7] Family historians unearthed several colorful and self-serving explanations for the origin of their name, many revolving around the Battle of Hastings in 1066, in which a forbearer fought under the name Truelove. It is related that when William the Conqueror was unhorsed during the fray, the nose guard of his helmet jammed into his face and had to be wrested free, allowing him to gasp for air (hence Eyre). The stalwart who performed that feat, and then helped the conqueror back into his saddle, lost a leg later in the fight, which helpfully explains the device at the top of the Eyre coat of arms, a leg cooped at the upper thigh (cooped is a heraldic term meaning “clean cut off.”) Other versions have the Eyre in question becoming an amputee in the service of Richard the Lion Heart, thereby throwing the entire story into the realm of apocrypha, but it seems that at some point an ancestor from the past gave suitable service to his king and was rewarded for it.[8]
John Eyre, to his misfortune, was the seventh son of ten in his family, and could predict little good fortune remaining in Wiltshire, England, where he was born at some unknown date. He and another younger son, Edward, were military men, and had likely joined a company of horse sent to Ireland in January of 1651 as reinforcements to the original army that had landed with Cromwell the previous year. Both these young men belonged to bands recruited in their native county and under the command of the noted regicide, Sir Edmund Ludlow, also a Wiltshire man. They were, as Ludlow wrote in his memoirs, armed with “back, breast, and head pieces, pistols and musketoons, with two months pay advanced.”[9] Landing in Duncannon, a few miles from Waterford, they participated in the siege of Limerick and the later mop-up campaign in Connaught, the royalists then under the dispirited leadership of Ulick Burke, fifth earl of Clanricard, which culminated in the fall of Galway City in April, 1652, where both Eyres were present. In the long and complicated maneuverings thereafter, as parliament attempted to figure out how to pay men such as these for their services, the “coin” of the moment became land. Both brothers received substantial grants both in the city itself and outlying portions of the province, augmented no doubt with purchases from fellow soldiers who had no wish to remain in Ireland.
Edward Eyre, and to a less extent his brother, became heavily involved, both politically and commercially, within the city walls (Eyre Square is a reminder of their presence, and Edward’s numerous feuds with the Martin family have been well established). But Col. John Eyre’s principal interests lay in the accumulation of farm and grazing lands in the eastern portion of the county, where his dexterity in figuring out how to handle the return of the Stuarts is a testament to his abilities. By the time of his death in 1685, he held properties in four counties, with most of his holdings centered around the “plantation” village he more or less created, Eyrecourt. His vision there can best be summarized by the privileges he was able to wheedle from the government of Charles II: a grant to establish a walled demesne and deer park of 500 acres, the right to hold biannual fairs and a weekly market, a monopoly on local police powers, permission to build a goal, and so on. Over time a regularized “mall” was envisioned, with a courthouse and other public amenities, which remain today off the main road through the village. In 1732, the indefatigable letter writer Mary Granville (Mrs. Delaney), after “jogging on through bogs and over plains,” noted approvingly that the “improvements looked very English;” and John Wesley wrote that the market house, where he preached, was “a large and handsome room,” reminders that Eyre had greater plans for this formerly unremarkable place then anything his successors eventually accomplished.[10] A member of the Irish parliament and in charge of several important royal commissions, Eyre served as a privy councilor for the last three years of his life. In the midst of this busy and, it would appear, productive life, Eyre built his “castle,” the year of which is unknown with certainty, but 1661 seems generally correct.
From available evidence, whatever artistic spirit Col. John Eyre exhibited when he built Eyrecourt Castle did not translate with any consistency into the behavior of his descendants. When the Irish political environment settled down after 1715, many gentlemen of the upper classes, whether nouveau or long lineaged, often took themselves to the continent, and especially Italy, to further both their educations and their accumulation of art treasures. In architecture, Ireland saw the construction of several Palladian style mansions, best exampled by William Conolly’s spectacular Castletown (begun 1722), and the flourishing of Irish creativity in the decorative arts throughout the country on various landed estates, particularly those close to Dublin. Eyrecourt, it seems, stood aside from such developments. The fifth in succession to Col Eyre, and also named John, held the usual offices to which the country gentry of Galway customarily aspired: member of parliament for two decades (beginning in 1747), sheriff of the county (1752), admitted to the bar (1754), followed by elevation to the peerage in 1768 as Baron Eyre of Eyrecourt, undoubtedly the work of George Townshend, the deeply unpopular viceroy from 1767 to 1772. Townshend’s portfolio from George III was to reform Ireland, to free its legislative processes from the often grotesque requirements of bribery and patronage (little better than “continual blackmail,” according to one historian), and to augment the manpower levels of Irish regiments, to be paid for locally, and not from England. All of these London-based goals were offensive, insulting, and threatening to the Irish Protestant elite, and to counterbalance their influence Townshend resorted to rewards of his own to sympathetic parliamentarians who came to be known as the “Castle party.” Eyre, considered a “serviceable member of the late House,” was one of these, and an earldom the result.[11]
Eyre was not an overly bookish man. Some letters survive, mostly written in his years of semiretirement, and these are well styled for the most part. He was contemptuous of the political environment in Ireland. The Irish parliament was little better than a den of thieves, in his opinion. In the House of Lords, “it astonished me to find men with one leg in the grave, as open to corruption, and as eager in pursuit of worldly advantages as if they were fifteen – nay, even among the hoary Bench of Bishops;” and as for local affairs, I “wish Galway was sunk in the sea.”[12] The dramatist Richard Cumberland recounted a visit to Eyrecourt c. 1770 (Cumberland’s father was bishop of Clonfert, whom he often visited, though it was surrounded by “impenetrable bog [and] dreary, undressed country”). He portrayed Eyre as a gentlemen, generous to a fault, but indolent, sitting in a chair all day “sipping wine,” a process “carried on with very little aid from conversation, for his lordship’s companions were not very communicative, and fortunately he was not very curious.” Cumberland also noted that Eyre had never “been out of Ireland in his life” (certainly not true), and that a trip they took together to visit a neighbor at nearby Mount Talbot was about as far as Eyre had been in years. This was not a man apt to travel to Rome, in other words, or to marvel at the great examples of classical architecture, paintings or tapestries. To be honest, it seems that Cumberland, was writing for effect, composing a charming portrait of an idiosyncratic and harmless member of the local gentry whose only real obsession was cock fighting. But he also noted the poor state of local agriculture – Eyre owned “a vast extent of soil, not very productive” – and also, ominously, his “spacious mansion, not in the best repair.”[13] The preacher John Wesley, who stopped in Eyrecourt at least eight times between 1749 and 1787 to hector the faithful, was impressed by Lord Eyre’s “noble old house,” especially the staircase (“grand”) and “two or three of the rooms,” but he also observed that the outhouses and grounds were in “ruinous” condition.[14] The seeds of this family’s gradual decline, so familiar to many other country estates, is thus plainly stated: poorly run agricultural domains, large and difficult-to-maintain great houses, all undercut by famously generous hosts indulging themselves in the country pursuits of field sports and social largess, summed up by what Cumberland called “more hospitality than elegance,” the dinner table “groaning with abundance.”[15]
The Eyre peerage went extinct at his death in 1781, when a nephew, one Giles Eyre, inherited the estate, heavily encumbered “in consequence of [Baron Eyre’s] electioneering tendencies, and other similar propensities,” but still enjoying an annual rent roll of £20,000.[16] So ghastly were Eyrecourt’s finances that Giles was unable to take up residence in the “castle” for some fifteen or so years, when one of the family’s major creditors, one Michael Prendergast, took possession as payment in kind.[17] Nonetheless, Giles made the situation incomparably worse with his own spectacular extravagancy upon his accession (he too spent lavishly trying to win a seat in parliament, said to have cost him in an 1811 contest some £80,000).[18] An English visitor who met Eyre noted in a privately published memoir two-well traveled themes when it came to describing the gentry of rural Ireland. In the first, that Giles Eyre was “evidently getting tired [of his patrimony], for like his neighbors, he was doing all he could to send it to the winds; he could barely write, and yet he contrived to sign his name to as many bonds … as would thatch Lough Cutra Castle.” The second was the addiction to field sports. “Hunting, fishing, shooting, drinking were his accomplishments,” he wrote. Eyre and his loutish friends, by “their violent and constant exercise by day occasioned them to take a booze at night, separating seldom till the dawn of day appeared, when the hounds and horses were all in readiness once more, so that t’was difficult, as many may well suppose, to distinguish one day from another.”[19] It was either the baron or Giles who built the enormous stables adjacent to the main house (and not to the rear, as in most instances), where Giles kept his own pack of hounds (precursor to those of the famous Galway Blazers, of which he was master from 1791 to 1829) and, it is said, from 30 to 40 hunters.[20] One is reminded here of county priorities, best exemplified by the inscription still to be seen over the archway to the stables of Dromoland Castle in County Clare, In equus partum virius (“The strength of a nation is in its horses”).[21] Charles Lever memorialized Eyre in one of his better known lines, “Ould Giles Eyre/Would make them stare,” a phrase the owner of Dooley’s Hotel in Birr would remember for years, after Eyre and a group of his rowdy friends started a fire on the premises which burned the place down (hence the origin, allegedly, of the moniker attached to the famous hunt, the “Blazers”).[22] Giles’s son and heir, another enthusiastic rider to the hounds, was killed in the winter of 1856 after taking a spill and breaking his neck, which enveloped the entire town “in a cloud of gloom.” His funeral, watched by a reported crowd of 6,000 (surely an exaggeration), was attended by the usual array of local gentry, i.e. Dalys, Moores, Lyons, Persses, Blakes, Ushers and so on. “He died at the mellowed but still hearty age of sixty-one,” according to a county newspaper.[23]
Eyre cousins and cadet branches were no better. Samuel Eyre of Eyreville, seven miles to the west, who died 1788, was described as an “idle, extravagant and reckless man, paying no attention to the family inheritance.”[24] The tales and travels of younger sons, with no immediate future in Ireland, followed the usual pattern over successive generations: military careers in far-flung outposts of the empire (and beyond) – Sudan, South Africa, India, Crimea, the West Indies, even action in the South American wars of independence – or office jobs in London, New York, and any number of small towns scattered throughout the British Isles, to say nothing of Australia and New Zealand. The profligacy of the various Eyrecourt Eyres resulted in the remainder of the estate being put up for sale in 1854, a division into 33 lots, in the hopes that £40,000 in debt could be resolved. By the time the auctioneer’s gavel reached # 26, the sum had been raised, the great house saved (“a hearty cheer burst from several of [Eyre’s] tenantry who were at the court”), but with such a diminished rent roll that supporting the old grand life style became next to impossible, if the situation were to be viewed factually.[25]
Along with these series of question marks, and contributing to the sense of irony that envelopes much of Eyrecourt’s long story, how did it happen that this singular creation has, for nearly one hundred years, sat disassembled in dozens of crates and, since 1951, been parked in a storage facility in suburban Detroit, Michigan? How did fate decree this, and what does its future hold?
The Eyre Family
It is intriguing to ruminate at the sense of optimism that a man such as Col. Eyre must have entertained to go through a building project of this sort and at this particular time in Ireland’s history. He had come to the island as a veteran of Cromwell’s New Model Army; he had lived through the uncertainties of civil war, the execution of a king, the varying and day-by-day switching of allegiances that the rush of political affairs often forced on its participants, followed by the return of the Stuarts who had what on their minds? Revenge, perhaps, the desire to see those punished who had cut off the head of a duly anointed monarch, the urge to strip those of uncertain loyalty of their lands, titles, wealth, and even lives. What possessed John Eyre to build anything other than a fortress, a stronghold, a redoubt surrounded by walls, instead of what he did commission, an open great house with windows, light and air, in a demesne or park without fortified gates or defensive works? This cannot logically be explained. Whose side would he have been on, for example, had he lived for another five years to 1690, when William of Orange came to Ireland to grapple with another divine right king, James II (undoubtedly William, one would suppose, but surprises always raise their heads during confusing times such as these; James Fitz James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond, a Protestant and a combatant for the Willamette forces at the Boyne, was attainted for treason in 1715 for his involvement in Catholic Jacobite conspiracies, so stranger things have happened).[6]
The events of Col. Eyre’s career have been capably treated in this journal, and do not require repeating in detail here.[7] Family historians unearthed several colorful and self-serving explanations for the origin of their name, many revolving around the Battle of Hastings in 1066, in which a forbearer fought under the name Truelove. It is related that when William the Conqueror was unhorsed during the fray, the nose guard of his helmet jammed into his face and had to be wrested free, allowing him to gasp for air (hence Eyre). The stalwart who performed that feat, and then helped the conqueror back into his saddle, lost a leg later in the fight, which helpfully explains the device at the top of the Eyre coat of arms, a leg cooped at the upper thigh (cooped is a heraldic term meaning “clean cut off.”) Other versions have the Eyre in question becoming an amputee in the service of Richard the Lion Heart, thereby throwing the entire story into the realm of apocrypha, but it seems that at some point an ancestor from the past gave suitable service to his king and was rewarded for it.[8]
John Eyre, to his misfortune, was the seventh son of ten in his family, and could predict little good fortune remaining in Wiltshire, England, where he was born at some unknown date. He and another younger son, Edward, were military men, and had likely joined a company of horse sent to Ireland in January of 1651 as reinforcements to the original army that had landed with Cromwell the previous year. Both these young men belonged to bands recruited in their native county and under the command of the noted regicide, Sir Edmund Ludlow, also a Wiltshire man. They were, as Ludlow wrote in his memoirs, armed with “back, breast, and head pieces, pistols and musketoons, with two months pay advanced.”[9] Landing in Duncannon, a few miles from Waterford, they participated in the siege of Limerick and the later mop-up campaign in Connaught, the royalists then under the dispirited leadership of Ulick Burke, fifth earl of Clanricard, which culminated in the fall of Galway City in April, 1652, where both Eyres were present. In the long and complicated maneuverings thereafter, as parliament attempted to figure out how to pay men such as these for their services, the “coin” of the moment became land. Both brothers received substantial grants both in the city itself and outlying portions of the province, augmented no doubt with purchases from fellow soldiers who had no wish to remain in Ireland.
Edward Eyre, and to a less extent his brother, became heavily involved, both politically and commercially, within the city walls (Eyre Square is a reminder of their presence, and Edward’s numerous feuds with the Martin family have been well established). But Col. John Eyre’s principal interests lay in the accumulation of farm and grazing lands in the eastern portion of the county, where his dexterity in figuring out how to handle the return of the Stuarts is a testament to his abilities. By the time of his death in 1685, he held properties in four counties, with most of his holdings centered around the “plantation” village he more or less created, Eyrecourt. His vision there can best be summarized by the privileges he was able to wheedle from the government of Charles II: a grant to establish a walled demesne and deer park of 500 acres, the right to hold biannual fairs and a weekly market, a monopoly on local police powers, permission to build a goal, and so on. Over time a regularized “mall” was envisioned, with a courthouse and other public amenities, which remain today off the main road through the village. In 1732, the indefatigable letter writer Mary Granville (Mrs. Delaney), after “jogging on through bogs and over plains,” noted approvingly that the “improvements looked very English;” and John Wesley wrote that the market house, where he preached, was “a large and handsome room,” reminders that Eyre had greater plans for this formerly unremarkable place then anything his successors eventually accomplished.[10] A member of the Irish parliament and in charge of several important royal commissions, Eyre served as a privy councilor for the last three years of his life. In the midst of this busy and, it would appear, productive life, Eyre built his “castle,” the year of which is unknown with certainty, but 1661 seems generally correct.
From available evidence, whatever artistic spirit Col. John Eyre exhibited when he built Eyrecourt Castle did not translate with any consistency into the behavior of his descendants. When the Irish political environment settled down after 1715, many gentlemen of the upper classes, whether nouveau or long lineaged, often took themselves to the continent, and especially Italy, to further both their educations and their accumulation of art treasures. In architecture, Ireland saw the construction of several Palladian style mansions, best exampled by William Conolly’s spectacular Castletown (begun 1722), and the flourishing of Irish creativity in the decorative arts throughout the country on various landed estates, particularly those close to Dublin. Eyrecourt, it seems, stood aside from such developments. The fifth in succession to Col Eyre, and also named John, held the usual offices to which the country gentry of Galway customarily aspired: member of parliament for two decades (beginning in 1747), sheriff of the county (1752), admitted to the bar (1754), followed by elevation to the peerage in 1768 as Baron Eyre of Eyrecourt, undoubtedly the work of George Townshend, the deeply unpopular viceroy from 1767 to 1772. Townshend’s portfolio from George III was to reform Ireland, to free its legislative processes from the often grotesque requirements of bribery and patronage (little better than “continual blackmail,” according to one historian), and to augment the manpower levels of Irish regiments, to be paid for locally, and not from England. All of these London-based goals were offensive, insulting, and threatening to the Irish Protestant elite, and to counterbalance their influence Townshend resorted to rewards of his own to sympathetic parliamentarians who came to be known as the “Castle party.” Eyre, considered a “serviceable member of the late House,” was one of these, and an earldom the result.[11]
Eyre was not an overly bookish man. Some letters survive, mostly written in his years of semiretirement, and these are well styled for the most part. He was contemptuous of the political environment in Ireland. The Irish parliament was little better than a den of thieves, in his opinion. In the House of Lords, “it astonished me to find men with one leg in the grave, as open to corruption, and as eager in pursuit of worldly advantages as if they were fifteen – nay, even among the hoary Bench of Bishops;” and as for local affairs, I “wish Galway was sunk in the sea.”[12] The dramatist Richard Cumberland recounted a visit to Eyrecourt c. 1770 (Cumberland’s father was bishop of Clonfert, whom he often visited, though it was surrounded by “impenetrable bog [and] dreary, undressed country”). He portrayed Eyre as a gentlemen, generous to a fault, but indolent, sitting in a chair all day “sipping wine,” a process “carried on with very little aid from conversation, for his lordship’s companions were not very communicative, and fortunately he was not very curious.” Cumberland also noted that Eyre had never “been out of Ireland in his life” (certainly not true), and that a trip they took together to visit a neighbor at nearby Mount Talbot was about as far as Eyre had been in years. This was not a man apt to travel to Rome, in other words, or to marvel at the great examples of classical architecture, paintings or tapestries. To be honest, it seems that Cumberland, was writing for effect, composing a charming portrait of an idiosyncratic and harmless member of the local gentry whose only real obsession was cock fighting. But he also noted the poor state of local agriculture – Eyre owned “a vast extent of soil, not very productive” – and also, ominously, his “spacious mansion, not in the best repair.”[13] The preacher John Wesley, who stopped in Eyrecourt at least eight times between 1749 and 1787 to hector the faithful, was impressed by Lord Eyre’s “noble old house,” especially the staircase (“grand”) and “two or three of the rooms,” but he also observed that the outhouses and grounds were in “ruinous” condition.[14] The seeds of this family’s gradual decline, so familiar to many other country estates, is thus plainly stated: poorly run agricultural domains, large and difficult-to-maintain great houses, all undercut by famously generous hosts indulging themselves in the country pursuits of field sports and social largess, summed up by what Cumberland called “more hospitality than elegance,” the dinner table “groaning with abundance.”[15]
The Eyre peerage went extinct at his death in 1781, when a nephew, one Giles Eyre, inherited the estate, heavily encumbered “in consequence of [Baron Eyre’s] electioneering tendencies, and other similar propensities,” but still enjoying an annual rent roll of £20,000.[16] So ghastly were Eyrecourt’s finances that Giles was unable to take up residence in the “castle” for some fifteen or so years, when one of the family’s major creditors, one Michael Prendergast, took possession as payment in kind.[17] Nonetheless, Giles made the situation incomparably worse with his own spectacular extravagancy upon his accession (he too spent lavishly trying to win a seat in parliament, said to have cost him in an 1811 contest some £80,000).[18] An English visitor who met Eyre noted in a privately published memoir two-well traveled themes when it came to describing the gentry of rural Ireland. In the first, that Giles Eyre was “evidently getting tired [of his patrimony], for like his neighbors, he was doing all he could to send it to the winds; he could barely write, and yet he contrived to sign his name to as many bonds … as would thatch Lough Cutra Castle.” The second was the addiction to field sports. “Hunting, fishing, shooting, drinking were his accomplishments,” he wrote. Eyre and his loutish friends, by “their violent and constant exercise by day occasioned them to take a booze at night, separating seldom till the dawn of day appeared, when the hounds and horses were all in readiness once more, so that t’was difficult, as many may well suppose, to distinguish one day from another.”[19] It was either the baron or Giles who built the enormous stables adjacent to the main house (and not to the rear, as in most instances), where Giles kept his own pack of hounds (precursor to those of the famous Galway Blazers, of which he was master from 1791 to 1829) and, it is said, from 30 to 40 hunters.[20] One is reminded here of county priorities, best exemplified by the inscription still to be seen over the archway to the stables of Dromoland Castle in County Clare, In equus partum virius (“The strength of a nation is in its horses”).[21] Charles Lever memorialized Eyre in one of his better known lines, “Ould Giles Eyre/Would make them stare,” a phrase the owner of Dooley’s Hotel in Birr would remember for years, after Eyre and a group of his rowdy friends started a fire on the premises which burned the place down (hence the origin, allegedly, of the moniker attached to the famous hunt, the “Blazers”).[22] Giles’s son and heir, another enthusiastic rider to the hounds, was killed in the winter of 1856 after taking a spill and breaking his neck, which enveloped the entire town “in a cloud of gloom.” His funeral, watched by a reported crowd of 6,000 (surely an exaggeration), was attended by the usual array of local gentry, i.e. Dalys, Moores, Lyons, Persses, Blakes, Ushers and so on. “He died at the mellowed but still hearty age of sixty-one,” according to a county newspaper.[23]
Eyre cousins and cadet branches were no better. Samuel Eyre of Eyreville, seven miles to the west, who died 1788, was described as an “idle, extravagant and reckless man, paying no attention to the family inheritance.”[24] The tales and travels of younger sons, with no immediate future in Ireland, followed the usual pattern over successive generations: military careers in far-flung outposts of the empire (and beyond) – Sudan, South Africa, India, Crimea, the West Indies, even action in the South American wars of independence – or office jobs in London, New York, and any number of small towns scattered throughout the British Isles, to say nothing of Australia and New Zealand. The profligacy of the various Eyrecourt Eyres resulted in the remainder of the estate being put up for sale in 1854, a division into 33 lots, in the hopes that £40,000 in debt could be resolved. By the time the auctioneer’s gavel reached # 26, the sum had been raised, the great house saved (“a hearty cheer burst from several of [Eyre’s] tenantry who were at the court”), but with such a diminished rent roll that supporting the old grand life style became next to impossible, if the situation were to be viewed factually.[25]
The East Galway Hunt by the great doorway, circa turn of the century
The entryway c. 1950s, everything stripped away save the ruinous door panels
The Eyres, however, seem to have been genetically sealed from reality, various press reports describing lavish entertainments.[26] In 1883 the house and demesne were again offered for sale in the Land Judges Court. By this time Eyre-controlled properties all over the county were being placed for sale (notices occur in 1857, 1869, 1870, and 1872). The Eyre of the moment holding Eyreville, the second largest of the family holdings, was described as “an insolvent debtor” when that estate was brought to market in 1883.[27] A privately printed history of the family, published fifteen years later, noted that the then current scion of Eyrecourt, one William Henry Gregory Eyre, “is a young man, and having started for himself in America as a mere boy, is full of mettle and go, having no nonsense about him, and he may yet retrieve the fallen fortunes of his family.”[28] At his death in 1925, however, he had become a caricature of sorts, the Anglo-Irish landlord “hanging on to a hulk of a house” with a diminished demesne, the remaining property having dwindled to a mere 620 acres, with paltry rents to match, not much to show from the heyday of this family’s fortunes when the Eyrecourt portfolio numbered over “30,000 green acres,” plus bog and mountain.[29]
What all these decades of declining cash flow, along with the rough and tumble antics of nearly two hundred years habitation by a riotous mélange of sport enthusiasts, meant to the fabric of Eyrecourt Castle must largely be imagined, as the condition of the main house was rarely mentioned in contemporary news accounts, diaries, or letters still extant. Our only clues are few. On the one hand, we have the idealized version, a pen and ink study of the stairway ensemble done by Lady Gregory (née Augusta Persse, of Roxborough House) c. 1888, and previously reproduced in this journal.[30] This time frame represents the beginning of Lady Gregory’s habit of sketching and painting historical subjects, especially those of local interest, which approximately coincides with her first attempts to learn Irish. Undoubtedly influenced by her husband, Sir William Gregory, whose interest in historic architecture and archeology was catholic in its wide range, Lady Gregory portrayed several sites in her Galway neighborhood, from Big Houses, Thoor Ballylee (purchased by W. B. Yeats in 1917), scenes from the Aran Islands, the round tower of Kilmacduagh (whose restoration William Gregory helped fund) and, in her widowhood, English cathedrals, Stonehenge, and other spots further afield. There are a few perfunctory mentions of Eyrecourt in Lady Gregory’s extant letters or diaries, but she was surely familiar with the family and interconnected with them at the usual social amenities of her time and class, i.e. hunts, fairs, dances, weddings, dinners and so on. In the visitor’s book of Arthur Clive Guinness’s Ashford Castle dated c. 1870, the attendance of both Miss Alice Eyre of Eyrecourt, and Lady Gregory’s brother, Robert Algeron Gregory of Roxborough, is noted for a weeklong house party.[31] That Lady Gregory visited Eyrecourt on some occasion, and felt compelled to record its most outstanding feature, is hardly remarkable. The last “scion” of Eyrecourt, for example, William Henry Gregory Eyre, was clearly so named as an honor by his father to Lady Gregory’s husband.
By contrast, there are, fortunately, several period photographs of the staircase, though exactly when they were taken is unknown, but probably in the first decade of the twentieth century.[32] Eyrecourt certainly enjoyed some amenities; a radiator is visible in one exposure, and the house had been wired for electricity, as evinced by a lighting stanchion suspended from the ceiling with 8 globes (one broken and not replaced). While electrification was not a rarity in the British Isles, it was certainly not unusual to visit Ireland for a country week of shooting to find one’s domicile still illuminated by candles and oil lamps. Hatfield House, Lord Salisbury’s magnificent palace some twenty miles out of London, was wired in 1882, but missteps clouded many years of its early use and discouraged imitation: sparks were a daily occurrence, the entire system failed regularly, and a gardener was inadvertently electrocuted. As a general rule, the electrification of the British Isles enjoyed it greatest surge between the two world wars (in England, the number of users jumped from 750,000 to 9 million in just twenty years, a trend duplicated, in much smaller numbers, in Ireland). Eyrecourt Castle, at least in this respect, was slightly ahead of the curve.[33]
But closer examination of these photographic images reveal a house well in the midst of its decline. A grouping of oriental rugs at the foot of the staircase appear shabby and frayed. The regal front doorway, so typical of Irish houses to this day, is enshrouded by an inner enclosure, a barrier to cold winds flying in from the west. The walls to the left and right of the first set of parallel stairs rising to the next landing show a few portraits and framed images but not, as is usual in British houses of similar pedigree, layered in rows from floor to ceiling (as has been commonly asserted, when a landed family fell into financial disarray, the first things sold were the contents of the library, if there was one, and then whatever artwork might be around).[34]
The stairway looking down from the second landing to foyer and entryway.
Study of the staircase reveals nicks, scratches, gouges, scuffing, and other marks of rough usage as well as, in the Knight of Glin’s phraseology, hints of “slovenly housekeeping.”[35] But most revealing is evidence that the staircase appears to have been stained (several years previously) with a black or brown veneer. When initially installed and as a final fillip, the wood may well have been marbled or similarly “veined” and then, possibly, gilded, a commonly used (and expensive) touch that has precedence in late seventeenth century decorative practice. That it was stained would appear to reflect the worsening financial condition of the Eyre family, who found the structure in need of reconditioning but unable to afford an accurate restoration, i.e. a dash of paint would do the job. It will be difficult to prove this supposition definitively, as the stairway’s second owner, William Randolph Hearst, had the entire structure stripped to the bare wood, perhaps in anticipation of a thorough rejuvenation to its original splendor.
The Mansion and its Staircase
A period photograph of Eyrecourt Castle from the late nineteenth century, with two ladies dressed in black seated on either side of the monumental doorway, is the best guide available to the somewhat idiosyncratic nature of the building’s construction. The façade presented seven bays of windows, three over the front door, covered by a wide triangular overhang supported by nine carved corbels, anchored on each end by dormer windows. The hip-roof is tilted as it descends (or “stacketed”), a common feature from the continent, i.e., titled upwards, giving the profile “a frivolous elegance,” and not a feature one would expect from this time period in the west of Ireland. The entire roof is also supported by ninety-eight corbels, all carved (presumably by the same workmen who did the staircase), as are the wooden frames for the windows. The Gothic tracery of the windowpanes themselves is allegedly of later workmanship, when the original window casings were replaced.[36]
Detailing the origins of the stairway’s design and execution, with its exceptionally fine carving, now enters the realm of speculation. There are clues and timelines to investigate, but any certainty as regards attribution, exact dating, or primary sources cannot be proven barring, of course, the discovery of hitherto unknown estate records, a dubious prospect given the Eyre family’s decline in County Galway and dispersion to the four corners of the globe.
The Mansion and its Staircase
A period photograph of Eyrecourt Castle from the late nineteenth century, with two ladies dressed in black seated on either side of the monumental doorway, is the best guide available to the somewhat idiosyncratic nature of the building’s construction. The façade presented seven bays of windows, three over the front door, covered by a wide triangular overhang supported by nine carved corbels, anchored on each end by dormer windows. The hip-roof is tilted as it descends (or “stacketed”), a common feature from the continent, i.e., titled upwards, giving the profile “a frivolous elegance,” and not a feature one would expect from this time period in the west of Ireland. The entire roof is also supported by ninety-eight corbels, all carved (presumably by the same workmen who did the staircase), as are the wooden frames for the windows. The Gothic tracery of the windowpanes themselves is allegedly of later workmanship, when the original window casings were replaced.[36]
Detailing the origins of the stairway’s design and execution, with its exceptionally fine carving, now enters the realm of speculation. There are clues and timelines to investigate, but any certainty as regards attribution, exact dating, or primary sources cannot be proven barring, of course, the discovery of hitherto unknown estate records, a dubious prospect given the Eyre family’s decline in County Galway and dispersion to the four corners of the globe.
Eryecourt Castle, date unknown, but presumably late 19th century.
Flower ensemble, decorative head of a newel post. Exceedingly heavy.
The notion of a grand staircase was certainly not an innovation as such. The winding stairs of a castle tower were no longer the architectural vogue of the early seventeenth century, as domestic architecture in Ireland began its evolution from purely military function to one of more graceful living. First examples of what, for want of better terminology, might be labeled the “Eyrecourt design,” had numerous antecedents in England, the earliest in stone, but the unwieldy weight of such structures saw a quick transition to wood, and largely of oak construction. While the vogue in “great halls” of the medieval sort was fading during this era,[37] the notion of a receiving salon of suitable grandeur was not, and the prevailing norm came to be that such a space would not be on the ground floor, but the one above it. The approach, therefore, had to match the expected solemnity of the main chamber in the house. In Great Britain, ornate staircases to the piano nobile grew more common and substantially more ornate as the century progressed. Staircases were broad, the steps themselves of less height than the old solid stone blocks used in castles and tower houses, and turn-about landings, leading to the next cascade of steps, a common feature (Eyrecourt features four “landings,” one of which is the main turn-around). Decorative flourishes mostly concentrated on the tops of newel posts (where plain acorn style sculptures were soon surpassed by growingly elaborate fruit and flower based carvings), wainscoting and, particularly, in panels which replaced simple balustrade poles. These grew especially florid, as Eyrecourt exemplified. Reaching the entryway to the formal room, the visitor would be greeted by a formal set of doors, usually flanked by a set of pilasters, comprising a base, a shaft (often grooved), surmounted by a capital. In many cases, but not at Eyrecourt, these pillars would be decorated with that most favored Roman motif, acanthus leaves.
The acanthus is a perennial shrub, most diverse and common in the Mediterranean basin. Noted for its spiny, thickly veined leaves, early stonemasons in Greece and Asia Minor appreciated its decorative possibilities as a “drape” or curling form drooping downwards, and carved them into the capital heads of supporting pillars that came to be known by the adjective “Corinthian.” Roman designers expanded the device by adding a volute, or spiral scrolling, from the “Ionic” capital, thereby coming up with what architectural historians call the “Composite” (or “mixed”) order, a device seen everywhere in the western world, even today. The acanthus leaf, with its flowing form and sculptural characteristics, became a favorite of Renaissance, and then baroque woodcarvers in particular, as well as their patrons who looked to the classical world, and particularly Rome, as the fountainhead of art and culture.[38] At Eyrecourt, the acanthus motif is exuberantly displayed in the several panels inserted between the steps themselves and the handrails. These make the military decorations in the balustrade at Ham House in Great Britain, mentioned previously, seem banal by comparison, no matter the skill of carving displayed.
How and why would a Col. John Eyre, or his wife, be inspired by such designs? Or better yet, how would he ever have learned about them? Eyrecourt was reputedly built in the early 1660s, Col. Eyre then a man of probably middle age and entering the prime of his life, both physically and professionally. He was now a person of some consequence, certainly in County Galway and in Dublin, and possibly in London. The great era of classical building in Ireland, generally thought to have commenced under the duke of Ormond in 1680 (the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham) was still two decades into the future, likewise the extraordinary work of the Huguenot wood carver James Tabary and his two brothers, who worked on the exquisite altar piece that graces its chapel. The premier woodcarver of the seventeenth-century generation, Grinling Gibbons, a "myth encrusted figure” according to one art historian,[39] had not even landed in London from Rotterdam after the Great Fire of 1666 to begin his extraordinary career, so in all probability Col. Eyre had never heard of him; nor do we have any proof that Eyre returned to England after his Cromwellian beginnings in Ireland a decade before, during which he might have observed the work of a growing number of artisans, largely Protestant, who were emigrating to London from the continent in search of work or commissions. Possibly the most promising, if most uncertain explanation of Eyrecourt’s origins, might be “word of mouth,” a category ambiguously described by the Irish architectural historian R. Loeber as “less well defined influences.”[40]
Sir Roger Pratt, along with Christopher Wren an important figure in the development of professionalism in the field of British architecture, was known to have written tracts of advice and “principles” to guide both other designer/builders and those who might employ them, though the bulk of these remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1685. His reputation in court circles was considerable, as evinced by his appointment by Charles II to join Wren and Hugh May as commissioners to oversee the reconstruction of fire-ravaged central London in 1666, for which he received a knighthood.[41] In one of his piquant observations, written perhaps to advise country gentlemen who might doubt their own abilities or inclinations when it came to envisioning the construction of a seat, Pratt noted firstly, to “resolve with yourself what house will be answerable to your purse and estate … then if you be not able to handsomely contrive it yourself, get some ingenious gentleman who has seen much of that kind abroad and been somewhat versed in the best authors of Architecture: viz. Palladio, Scamozzi, Serlio etc. to do it for you, and to give you a design of it in paper.”[42] Such shadowy figures as these, i.e. “some ingenious gentlemen,” might have a satchel of drawings, elevations, sketches, or profiles of their own designs to pour over with a potential client, or a booklet of engravings or plates depicting examples from ancient Rome or, perhaps, representations of newly famous buildings, such as the town hall of Amsterdam, begun in 1648. These were ready-made to adapt, copy, or alter as circumstances (or one’s financial circumstances) might allow. It is interesting to note that Pratt was best known for producing buildings that seem, at first glance, remarkably similar to Eyrecourt: hipped roofs, dormer windows, a surround walkway for views, half- windows on the subfloor, and a monumental two-story central staircase with uniformly sized rooms on either side, anchored by the principal salon in the center.[43] Such a “gentlemen” could be found in what way? To use a current phrase, probably via networking of the day: a conversation in Dublin, perhaps, a letter from an acquaintance or relation living in London, chitchat in any number of social interactions, the request for a recommendation from someone higher on the societal chain than yourself, but whom one would like to emulate (the gregarious duke of Ormond, perhaps, whose long and tumultuous career did not detract him from an active interest in the arts, education, and culture in general, and a Col. Eyre being the type of accommodating Protestant that appealed to him).[44] And what might this “gentlemen” have by way of antecedents?
In terms of Eyrecourt, certainly a copy of Sebastiano Serlio’s monumental Architettura was consulted, a seven-volume masterwork lavishly illustrated and carefully organized into specific categories, “On the Five Styles of Buildings,” “On Geometry, On Perspective,” “Extraordinary Book of Doors,” and so on. Serlio began his career as a painter in Bologna but, like so many artisans and craftspeople, wandered about from city to city, spending considerable time in Venice and branching his skill-set into several directions, such as engineering military works, decorating churches, and working on his book(s). Architettura came to the attention of François I, king of France, who invited Serlio to consult on the extravagant hunting palace then being constructed at Fontainebleau, which sealed his reputation and his finances. Architettura was a true ground-breaker in the history of architectural writing, the first printed exemplar of high Renaissance style, written not so much as a history of building trends, but more as a primer to inform, instruct, and guide. Its influence cannot be underestimated. It was published in several editions beginning in 1486, and appeared in Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, German and, finally, the first four volumes in English, 1611.[45] In Book 7, the parallels between one of Serlio’s sketches and an Eyrecourt fireplace are indisputable.[46]
Serlio was only the beginning. As the seventeenth century progressed and deepened, the circulation of pattern books, practical carpentry guides, volumes of plates and engravings, increased exponentially, along with more philosophical musings on architecture in general, such as Sir Henry Wotton’s important Elements of Architecture Collected … from the Best Authors & Examples, 1624.[47] By the 1700s, British and Irish craftsmen had a plethora of titles to consult, as well as the knowledge and skill of countless foreign workers from whose example their own development could progress. These men travelled widely, from city to city, job site to job site. Those who built Eyrecourt were not “some hedge carpenter(s),” as Lady Morgan referenced in her The Wild Irish Girl, though they were, collectively, just as anonymous.[48]
In determining the provenance of the staircase carvings, which has perplexed art historians for decades, the same questions arise. Who carved the balustrade panels, the flower urns, the set of grotesque heads that overlook the two archways over the first set of risers, the carvings on the raised panels of the newel posts? Were they created on site or ordered from abroad and shipped to Ireland? What tradition or school do they represent? The Knight of Glin, Ireland’s premier authority on such matters, at first suggested Germany, but later Holland or the Lowlands.[49] It is doubtful, in fact, if we will ever know.
There are hints, to be sure. The Town Hall of Amsterdam, completed in 1655, features fifteen years worth of work by the sculptor Artus (Arnold) Quellinus, whose designs were portrayed in elegant engravings by his brother, Hubert, in a folio edition dated 1660. These were immensely popular as reference materials, illustrating decorative flourishes, cascades, and ornaments that both sculptors and wood carvers copied for decades. Quellinus’s work had more impetus on the spread of what is called “Flemish baroque” then that of any other single artist.
Dutch traditions in still-life paintings of flowers, wheat stalks, garlands of plant life, game, and so on, provided considerable inspiration to those working in wood, in particular the spectacular carvings of Grinling Gibbons, who is only the most famous of what were, in fact, a growing number of artisans working in and around London during the great boom of the 1670s. As Charles II, from his days in exile, had considerable familiarity with Holland and France, and less so of Italy, it is not surprising that the initial influx of skilled craftsmen in most of the decorative arts (save plasterers) came from those countries, and were encouraged to do so (as in 1662, with a legislation entitled “An act for encouraging Protestant strangers and others to inhabit Ireland”).[50] That these craftsmen traveled widely once in Great Britain is also indisputable, and in their employments from worksite to worksite experiences were shared, trade secrets observed and copied, skills honed. Inevitably a trickle of such talents reached Ireland, where their services were especially valued as a building resurgence commenced after the Restoration in 1660 that would continue until the Williamite wars began twenty-eight years later. Soldiers turned “gentlemen” such as Eyre began building different sorts of structures, different, that is, to what powerful men like Richard Burke, 4th earl of Clanricard, had built in nearby Portumna just forty years before – a “strong house” to be sure, but one not completely given over to a military purpose. In the words of Henry Hyde, earl of Clarendon and lord lieutenant of Ireland, the goal now were buildings “raised for beauty.”[51]
Certainly the pastoral motifs of Gibbons and his contemporaries multiplied exponentially in the building projects of both the greater and lesser nobility throughout Great Britain. Windows, doorways, mirrors, portraits, and so forth, were commonly surrounded by woodcarvings of laurels, ribbons, flowers and the like, all wrapped around everything from columns to musical instruments. Masters like Gibbons were relentlessly imitated, much to their annoyance it must be assumed, but they were so busy with work, many originating from Christopher Wren’s commission to replace fifty-two of the eighty-seven parish churches in London destroyed by the Great Fire, that prosecution of intellectual theft was no doubt physically impossible.[52] Wren surrounded himself with designers, contractors, planners – the entire panoply of the construction industry – that for many highly skilled and sought for men there was hardly time to think. Gibbons grew rich, and the owners of ateliers of workmen, such as the redoubtable Edward Pearce, who also worked with Wren, dealt with all manner of decorative projects in both stone and wood. The great staircase of Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire, contemporaneous with Eyrecourt’s, gives our best clue yet at to the possible construction mode of Eyrecourt. Pearce evidently did not design or build the outer structure of the staircase; his commission was restricted solely to the balustrade’s paneling, which were the by now customary interweave of acanthus leaves in full floridity, evidently carved in Pearce’s workshop in London, then shipped to the site for installation. Pearce received £112. 15s. 5d for all the panels, two door casings, and miscellaneous “swags” and “festoons.” [53]
The acanthus is a perennial shrub, most diverse and common in the Mediterranean basin. Noted for its spiny, thickly veined leaves, early stonemasons in Greece and Asia Minor appreciated its decorative possibilities as a “drape” or curling form drooping downwards, and carved them into the capital heads of supporting pillars that came to be known by the adjective “Corinthian.” Roman designers expanded the device by adding a volute, or spiral scrolling, from the “Ionic” capital, thereby coming up with what architectural historians call the “Composite” (or “mixed”) order, a device seen everywhere in the western world, even today. The acanthus leaf, with its flowing form and sculptural characteristics, became a favorite of Renaissance, and then baroque woodcarvers in particular, as well as their patrons who looked to the classical world, and particularly Rome, as the fountainhead of art and culture.[38] At Eyrecourt, the acanthus motif is exuberantly displayed in the several panels inserted between the steps themselves and the handrails. These make the military decorations in the balustrade at Ham House in Great Britain, mentioned previously, seem banal by comparison, no matter the skill of carving displayed.
How and why would a Col. John Eyre, or his wife, be inspired by such designs? Or better yet, how would he ever have learned about them? Eyrecourt was reputedly built in the early 1660s, Col. Eyre then a man of probably middle age and entering the prime of his life, both physically and professionally. He was now a person of some consequence, certainly in County Galway and in Dublin, and possibly in London. The great era of classical building in Ireland, generally thought to have commenced under the duke of Ormond in 1680 (the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham) was still two decades into the future, likewise the extraordinary work of the Huguenot wood carver James Tabary and his two brothers, who worked on the exquisite altar piece that graces its chapel. The premier woodcarver of the seventeenth-century generation, Grinling Gibbons, a "myth encrusted figure” according to one art historian,[39] had not even landed in London from Rotterdam after the Great Fire of 1666 to begin his extraordinary career, so in all probability Col. Eyre had never heard of him; nor do we have any proof that Eyre returned to England after his Cromwellian beginnings in Ireland a decade before, during which he might have observed the work of a growing number of artisans, largely Protestant, who were emigrating to London from the continent in search of work or commissions. Possibly the most promising, if most uncertain explanation of Eyrecourt’s origins, might be “word of mouth,” a category ambiguously described by the Irish architectural historian R. Loeber as “less well defined influences.”[40]
Sir Roger Pratt, along with Christopher Wren an important figure in the development of professionalism in the field of British architecture, was known to have written tracts of advice and “principles” to guide both other designer/builders and those who might employ them, though the bulk of these remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1685. His reputation in court circles was considerable, as evinced by his appointment by Charles II to join Wren and Hugh May as commissioners to oversee the reconstruction of fire-ravaged central London in 1666, for which he received a knighthood.[41] In one of his piquant observations, written perhaps to advise country gentlemen who might doubt their own abilities or inclinations when it came to envisioning the construction of a seat, Pratt noted firstly, to “resolve with yourself what house will be answerable to your purse and estate … then if you be not able to handsomely contrive it yourself, get some ingenious gentleman who has seen much of that kind abroad and been somewhat versed in the best authors of Architecture: viz. Palladio, Scamozzi, Serlio etc. to do it for you, and to give you a design of it in paper.”[42] Such shadowy figures as these, i.e. “some ingenious gentlemen,” might have a satchel of drawings, elevations, sketches, or profiles of their own designs to pour over with a potential client, or a booklet of engravings or plates depicting examples from ancient Rome or, perhaps, representations of newly famous buildings, such as the town hall of Amsterdam, begun in 1648. These were ready-made to adapt, copy, or alter as circumstances (or one’s financial circumstances) might allow. It is interesting to note that Pratt was best known for producing buildings that seem, at first glance, remarkably similar to Eyrecourt: hipped roofs, dormer windows, a surround walkway for views, half- windows on the subfloor, and a monumental two-story central staircase with uniformly sized rooms on either side, anchored by the principal salon in the center.[43] Such a “gentlemen” could be found in what way? To use a current phrase, probably via networking of the day: a conversation in Dublin, perhaps, a letter from an acquaintance or relation living in London, chitchat in any number of social interactions, the request for a recommendation from someone higher on the societal chain than yourself, but whom one would like to emulate (the gregarious duke of Ormond, perhaps, whose long and tumultuous career did not detract him from an active interest in the arts, education, and culture in general, and a Col. Eyre being the type of accommodating Protestant that appealed to him).[44] And what might this “gentlemen” have by way of antecedents?
In terms of Eyrecourt, certainly a copy of Sebastiano Serlio’s monumental Architettura was consulted, a seven-volume masterwork lavishly illustrated and carefully organized into specific categories, “On the Five Styles of Buildings,” “On Geometry, On Perspective,” “Extraordinary Book of Doors,” and so on. Serlio began his career as a painter in Bologna but, like so many artisans and craftspeople, wandered about from city to city, spending considerable time in Venice and branching his skill-set into several directions, such as engineering military works, decorating churches, and working on his book(s). Architettura came to the attention of François I, king of France, who invited Serlio to consult on the extravagant hunting palace then being constructed at Fontainebleau, which sealed his reputation and his finances. Architettura was a true ground-breaker in the history of architectural writing, the first printed exemplar of high Renaissance style, written not so much as a history of building trends, but more as a primer to inform, instruct, and guide. Its influence cannot be underestimated. It was published in several editions beginning in 1486, and appeared in Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, German and, finally, the first four volumes in English, 1611.[45] In Book 7, the parallels between one of Serlio’s sketches and an Eyrecourt fireplace are indisputable.[46]
Serlio was only the beginning. As the seventeenth century progressed and deepened, the circulation of pattern books, practical carpentry guides, volumes of plates and engravings, increased exponentially, along with more philosophical musings on architecture in general, such as Sir Henry Wotton’s important Elements of Architecture Collected … from the Best Authors & Examples, 1624.[47] By the 1700s, British and Irish craftsmen had a plethora of titles to consult, as well as the knowledge and skill of countless foreign workers from whose example their own development could progress. These men travelled widely, from city to city, job site to job site. Those who built Eyrecourt were not “some hedge carpenter(s),” as Lady Morgan referenced in her The Wild Irish Girl, though they were, collectively, just as anonymous.[48]
In determining the provenance of the staircase carvings, which has perplexed art historians for decades, the same questions arise. Who carved the balustrade panels, the flower urns, the set of grotesque heads that overlook the two archways over the first set of risers, the carvings on the raised panels of the newel posts? Were they created on site or ordered from abroad and shipped to Ireland? What tradition or school do they represent? The Knight of Glin, Ireland’s premier authority on such matters, at first suggested Germany, but later Holland or the Lowlands.[49] It is doubtful, in fact, if we will ever know.
There are hints, to be sure. The Town Hall of Amsterdam, completed in 1655, features fifteen years worth of work by the sculptor Artus (Arnold) Quellinus, whose designs were portrayed in elegant engravings by his brother, Hubert, in a folio edition dated 1660. These were immensely popular as reference materials, illustrating decorative flourishes, cascades, and ornaments that both sculptors and wood carvers copied for decades. Quellinus’s work had more impetus on the spread of what is called “Flemish baroque” then that of any other single artist.
Dutch traditions in still-life paintings of flowers, wheat stalks, garlands of plant life, game, and so on, provided considerable inspiration to those working in wood, in particular the spectacular carvings of Grinling Gibbons, who is only the most famous of what were, in fact, a growing number of artisans working in and around London during the great boom of the 1670s. As Charles II, from his days in exile, had considerable familiarity with Holland and France, and less so of Italy, it is not surprising that the initial influx of skilled craftsmen in most of the decorative arts (save plasterers) came from those countries, and were encouraged to do so (as in 1662, with a legislation entitled “An act for encouraging Protestant strangers and others to inhabit Ireland”).[50] That these craftsmen traveled widely once in Great Britain is also indisputable, and in their employments from worksite to worksite experiences were shared, trade secrets observed and copied, skills honed. Inevitably a trickle of such talents reached Ireland, where their services were especially valued as a building resurgence commenced after the Restoration in 1660 that would continue until the Williamite wars began twenty-eight years later. Soldiers turned “gentlemen” such as Eyre began building different sorts of structures, different, that is, to what powerful men like Richard Burke, 4th earl of Clanricard, had built in nearby Portumna just forty years before – a “strong house” to be sure, but one not completely given over to a military purpose. In the words of Henry Hyde, earl of Clarendon and lord lieutenant of Ireland, the goal now were buildings “raised for beauty.”[51]
Certainly the pastoral motifs of Gibbons and his contemporaries multiplied exponentially in the building projects of both the greater and lesser nobility throughout Great Britain. Windows, doorways, mirrors, portraits, and so forth, were commonly surrounded by woodcarvings of laurels, ribbons, flowers and the like, all wrapped around everything from columns to musical instruments. Masters like Gibbons were relentlessly imitated, much to their annoyance it must be assumed, but they were so busy with work, many originating from Christopher Wren’s commission to replace fifty-two of the eighty-seven parish churches in London destroyed by the Great Fire, that prosecution of intellectual theft was no doubt physically impossible.[52] Wren surrounded himself with designers, contractors, planners – the entire panoply of the construction industry – that for many highly skilled and sought for men there was hardly time to think. Gibbons grew rich, and the owners of ateliers of workmen, such as the redoubtable Edward Pearce, who also worked with Wren, dealt with all manner of decorative projects in both stone and wood. The great staircase of Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire, contemporaneous with Eyrecourt’s, gives our best clue yet at to the possible construction mode of Eyrecourt. Pearce evidently did not design or build the outer structure of the staircase; his commission was restricted solely to the balustrade’s paneling, which were the by now customary interweave of acanthus leaves in full floridity, evidently carved in Pearce’s workshop in London, then shipped to the site for installation. Pearce received £112. 15s. 5d for all the panels, two door casings, and miscellaneous “swags” and “festoons.” [53]
Auction catalogue, Kilkenny Castle, 18 November 1935.
Might this have been a blueprint for Eyrecourt? It is known that an apprentice of Pearce’s, one William Kidwell, branched out from London and sought work in Ireland. In his head, of course, were years of observation and hands-on attention to detail that could have been well employed on a worksite in the west of Ireland. Unfortunately, Kidwell’s dates are far later than Eyrecourt’s theoretical time line, but the pattern of such cross-fertilization, while imprecise, cannot be ruled out.[54]
In the summer of 1791, the Williamite army of mostly foreign contingents under the command of the Dutch soldier Godert de Ginkell were on the march west, looking to confront the residue of Jacobite forces in Ireland led by the Marquis de St. Ruth. They would find them at the village of Aughrim, some fourteen miles further down the road, where the climactic battle for control of Ireland would be fought on July 12. Eyrecourt stood deserted. Col. Eyre’s son, another John, had fled to Dublin, like so many other Protestant planters, as troops wandered back and forth through his demesne and estates. It is a wonder Eyrecourt was not put to the torch. An English officer took note of what he saw. “There stands the much noted house in Connacht called Eyre’ Court,” he wrote, “being a pleasant seat built by one Mr. Eyre and much celebrated in the country, but by what I could perceive in marching by is nothing answerable to what fame reports. All that can be said, it is a pretty gentleman’s seat, the house large with a pleasant wood on the back of it, but no good prospect any way, nor any river near it.”[55] Whether he stopped to take a look at the grand staircase is anyone’s guess, but likely not, for surely such a sight would have elicited some sort of remark.
Hard Times
“Alas for the Gormanston estate!” wrote the wife of the fifteenth viscount of that name in her memoirs, published in 1957, and her lament by then was so common that it almost stands as cliché for the fate of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. What with “no-rent campaigns,” the estate’s “heavy load of mortgages,” devastating land acts from both London and then the Free State – to say nothing of collapsing ceilings and ever spreading dry rot– there could be no return to the extravagant life style that fourteen previous viscounts (and their forebears stretching back to the fourteenth century) had enjoyed on the grounds of Gormanston Castle in County Meath.[56] Gormanston was lucky. It was not burned to the ground between 1920 and 1923, a fate over 275 other Big Houses endured during that time period, and survives to this day as a school.[57] Eyrecourt Castle, likewise, was never burned to the ground, but it won’t be long before what is left of it, four walls and not much more, collapses in a pile of rubble.
William Henry Gregory Eyre, the last of the Eyres to occupy the “grand House,” had been unable to resuscitate his family’s fortunes, but then again, who could have? The financial conditions he faced were not of some sudden development; the stray commentaries still extant, and stretching back to the days of Baron Eyre himself, had all noted the mounting debts brought on by profligate life styles, marriage settlements, poor management and, by the end of the nineteenth century, taxes, death duties, and balance sheets disturbed by agrarian and political turmoil.[58] Landlords living on their rent rolls, as most of these gentleman did, could not sustain themselves when mortgage and debts payments were not correspondingly matched by a tenantry’s willingness to pay. Quite the reverse, those farmers were now dedicated to the dispossession and ruin of the landed class. Added to this was the agricultural depression of the 1870s that continued right up until the beginning of World War I, when price levels finally matched what farmers were making over forty years before. The Windham Act of 1903, termed by one historian as the last “carrot” to be offered the Ascendancy, saw a great rush by landlords to sell out, a 12% bonus on the selling price being especially attractive (the duke of Leinster sold 41,000 acres [£786,000], and the seventh earl Fitzwilliam some 53,000 [£470,000]).[59] This was a considerably better deal than that offered by the Free State two decades later, which was essentially compulsory confiscation. Not that William Eyre had much left to forfeit. Unlike a Leinster or Fitzwilliam, his estates had been largely reduced to nothing, and no rents meant no frivolities, and certainly no maintenance funds for a country house that more than once had been noted for its “shabby” condition.[60]
In the efforts to retain their estates, as remarked previously, many families resorted to selling off heirlooms before anything else, land being considered their most important asset both financially and socially. Such sales could bring spectacular results (though often short-lived, given the upcoming Great Depression which no one foresaw), especially among the upper crust of the Anglo-Irish gentry, many of whose discerning forbearers had collected lavishly in the past. When the widow of Sir Robert Thomas Chapman died in 1920, leaving an impossibly complicated inheritance, her surviving daughters sold everything in the house, including original paintings by Holbein, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt (Samson Threatening His Father-in-Law). This was not enough in the long run to save the estate, reduced from its original 9,000 acres to barely over a thousand at the time of its sale in 1949. Edward Fitzgerald, the unbelievably florid seventh duke of Leinster, denuded Carton House of most of its furnishings, old master paintings, and objets d’art in three sales, all in the single year 1925 (William Randolph Hearst bought many of these); these cash infusions did not prevent him from ending up, eventually, in a squalid rooming house in London, where he died a suicide in 1976.[61] Photographs of the Eyrecourt interior, by contrast, present an aesthetic larder that can only be described as “bare.” The artwork hanging on the walls appear to be family portraits for the most part (those reproduced in the Eyre hagiography, Signpost to Eyrecourt, are of mediocre quality); and the upper walls of the entryway reveal picture hooks, but no pictures, possibly indicating one or two sales for ready cash. The Eyres, it would appear, were minor art collectors at best; no van Dykes, Gainsboroughs, or sporting scenes by Charles Lutyens. Many of the lesser gentry, when they did purchase paintings, often did so in Dublin from dealers specializing in copies of Italian masters, but there is little indication that even this was the case with the Eyre family. As for libraries, whose richly bound copies of Greek and Latin classics always fetched good prices, the available evidence indicates there were none to be had at Eyrecourt. As Cumberland said of Baron Eyre, “He had no books.”[62]
Perhaps William Henry Gregory Eyre might have married better, a recourse frequently desired by the gentry of both Britain and Ireland for half a century, with generally uneven results. (Consuelo Vanderbilt, married to the ninth duke of Marlborough by her social-climbing mother in 1896, was not the satisfied woman portrayed by Sargent in his famous portrait of the couple with their two children; she came to the dinner table in the waning years of her marriage with a revolver, which she placed next to her plate and pointed at her husband).[63] When Eyre died in a Dublin nursing home on February 18, 1925, the only thing of any real value left was the monumental staircase. The questions became, did the Eyres appreciate its value, and even if they did, what were they to do with it?
As to the former query, we will never know. Eyre’s son, a military man who inherited the financial debacle of his father’s affairs, died in England in 1992, without leaving any published comment on something that had happened sixty-seven long years before. But it was likely he, representing his mother, who arranged the disposition of the staircase, or at least allowed himself to be advised as to its fate, no doubt by his estate manager, his lawyer, perhaps some relation with ready advice, or a combination of all three. No options were good options, nor had there been for several years. The land agent for the 7th earl of Granard, who held Castleforbes in County Longford, offered his client the usual bleak advice in a memo dated 1892: the earl’s Great House was “unsalable in the market and therefore valueless except as building material.”[64] This must have been a shocking piece of news to Granard, but one he had to swallow. In 1935 James Butler, 3rd Marquess of Ormonde, held an estate sale at the great Butler estate at Kilkenny, which generated about £6,000. He then abandoned the country for London, leaving the seat of his family uninhabited for some thirty years, when it was sold for £50 to the town. An English visitor compared Kilkenny Castle to “a weather-beaten ship in a storm, after a long voyage, with all her cargo thrown overboard.”[65]
Whatever the impetus (taxes and mortgage arrears, in all probability), the Eyrecourt staircase was sold off after Eyre’s death in 1926 by his heirs, dismantled and packed into crates, then shipped to London. The melancholy atmospherics of this financial quagmire brings to mind Lever’s novel, Charles O’Malley, where he writes, concerning similar circumstances, that “One thing was clear: the whole estates of the family could not possibly pay one-fourth of the debt, and the only question was one which occasionally arises at a scanty dinner on a mail-coach road – who was to be the lucky individual to carve the joint, where so many were sure to go off hungry.”[66] The man who benefited from this impoverished larder was William Randolph Hearst.
WHR, or “Willie”
An only child, William Randolph Hearst was born in San Francisco,1863, to a rough and ready speculator in western mining interests, one George Hearst, and his much younger wife, née Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson. The elder Hearst made and lost fortunes during his long and colorful career, much of it spent prospecting alone far from the madding crowd, or putting together deals in the less than salubrious environs of frontier camps in Wyoming and Utah. His wife cultivated more refined interests, and indeed their marriage became more one of convenience than affection as the years passed by. Phoebe was rarely to be seen in places like Hangtown or Virginia City, preferring to spend her time in comfortable townhouses in and around San Francisco. George Hearst never hesitated paying the bills, however, and when his wife determined on a Grand Tour of Europe he readily agreed, not so much to please her as to please his ten-year-old son. George, having no interest in the decadent life styles of kings and queens, and even less in Shakespeare, stayed behind to tend his business affairs. In the fall of 1873, Phoebe and William Randolph departed New York on the SS Adriatic. Accompanied by a tutor for “Willie,” they would be gone for twenty months.
This European adventure had a profoundly formulative influence on just about every aspect of Hearst’s developing character, traits that would affect his personal and professional life both positively and negatively in the years to come. Their first stop was Ireland (William did not care for Irish men folk, whom he noted were “bad to the women and horses”),[67] followed by long sojourns in Scotland, England, Belgium, Holland Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy (for six months), then finally to Paris (the Hôtel d’Albe on the Champs Élysées was their home there) before finally returning to San Francisco. Phoebe, as a budding intellectual and aesthete, was determined to show her son just about everything that ancient Europe had to offer, and became in effect a major domo of the tour, micromanaging every detail and making certain that no aesthetic stone was left unturned. Hours and hours of museum hopping, specialized introductions to art collections and cultural sights, visits to operas and plays, nothing was left to chance or idleness. Hearst’s natural curiosity in history and the arts was gratified at just about every turn, and so too his desire to own many of the lovely objects that he admired, a trait that turned compulsive as he grew older. George and Phoebe Hearst meaningfully shared only one thing in common, a desire to see their son’s every wish fulfilled. WRH later admitted that he was little more than an “American brat,” whose self-indulgence grew to proportions rarely seen before or after. Both parents were well aware, and indeed encouraged, his acquisitiveness. He collected everything, from comic books to beer steins to stamps. When “Willie feels bad,” his mother noted, “he goes out and buys something.” “I’ve been watching him,” his father added, “and I notice that when he wants cake, he wants cake, and he wants it now.” Neither parent saw any reason to curb their son’s precociousness.[68]
In the summer of 1791, the Williamite army of mostly foreign contingents under the command of the Dutch soldier Godert de Ginkell were on the march west, looking to confront the residue of Jacobite forces in Ireland led by the Marquis de St. Ruth. They would find them at the village of Aughrim, some fourteen miles further down the road, where the climactic battle for control of Ireland would be fought on July 12. Eyrecourt stood deserted. Col. Eyre’s son, another John, had fled to Dublin, like so many other Protestant planters, as troops wandered back and forth through his demesne and estates. It is a wonder Eyrecourt was not put to the torch. An English officer took note of what he saw. “There stands the much noted house in Connacht called Eyre’ Court,” he wrote, “being a pleasant seat built by one Mr. Eyre and much celebrated in the country, but by what I could perceive in marching by is nothing answerable to what fame reports. All that can be said, it is a pretty gentleman’s seat, the house large with a pleasant wood on the back of it, but no good prospect any way, nor any river near it.”[55] Whether he stopped to take a look at the grand staircase is anyone’s guess, but likely not, for surely such a sight would have elicited some sort of remark.
Hard Times
“Alas for the Gormanston estate!” wrote the wife of the fifteenth viscount of that name in her memoirs, published in 1957, and her lament by then was so common that it almost stands as cliché for the fate of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. What with “no-rent campaigns,” the estate’s “heavy load of mortgages,” devastating land acts from both London and then the Free State – to say nothing of collapsing ceilings and ever spreading dry rot– there could be no return to the extravagant life style that fourteen previous viscounts (and their forebears stretching back to the fourteenth century) had enjoyed on the grounds of Gormanston Castle in County Meath.[56] Gormanston was lucky. It was not burned to the ground between 1920 and 1923, a fate over 275 other Big Houses endured during that time period, and survives to this day as a school.[57] Eyrecourt Castle, likewise, was never burned to the ground, but it won’t be long before what is left of it, four walls and not much more, collapses in a pile of rubble.
William Henry Gregory Eyre, the last of the Eyres to occupy the “grand House,” had been unable to resuscitate his family’s fortunes, but then again, who could have? The financial conditions he faced were not of some sudden development; the stray commentaries still extant, and stretching back to the days of Baron Eyre himself, had all noted the mounting debts brought on by profligate life styles, marriage settlements, poor management and, by the end of the nineteenth century, taxes, death duties, and balance sheets disturbed by agrarian and political turmoil.[58] Landlords living on their rent rolls, as most of these gentleman did, could not sustain themselves when mortgage and debts payments were not correspondingly matched by a tenantry’s willingness to pay. Quite the reverse, those farmers were now dedicated to the dispossession and ruin of the landed class. Added to this was the agricultural depression of the 1870s that continued right up until the beginning of World War I, when price levels finally matched what farmers were making over forty years before. The Windham Act of 1903, termed by one historian as the last “carrot” to be offered the Ascendancy, saw a great rush by landlords to sell out, a 12% bonus on the selling price being especially attractive (the duke of Leinster sold 41,000 acres [£786,000], and the seventh earl Fitzwilliam some 53,000 [£470,000]).[59] This was a considerably better deal than that offered by the Free State two decades later, which was essentially compulsory confiscation. Not that William Eyre had much left to forfeit. Unlike a Leinster or Fitzwilliam, his estates had been largely reduced to nothing, and no rents meant no frivolities, and certainly no maintenance funds for a country house that more than once had been noted for its “shabby” condition.[60]
In the efforts to retain their estates, as remarked previously, many families resorted to selling off heirlooms before anything else, land being considered their most important asset both financially and socially. Such sales could bring spectacular results (though often short-lived, given the upcoming Great Depression which no one foresaw), especially among the upper crust of the Anglo-Irish gentry, many of whose discerning forbearers had collected lavishly in the past. When the widow of Sir Robert Thomas Chapman died in 1920, leaving an impossibly complicated inheritance, her surviving daughters sold everything in the house, including original paintings by Holbein, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt (Samson Threatening His Father-in-Law). This was not enough in the long run to save the estate, reduced from its original 9,000 acres to barely over a thousand at the time of its sale in 1949. Edward Fitzgerald, the unbelievably florid seventh duke of Leinster, denuded Carton House of most of its furnishings, old master paintings, and objets d’art in three sales, all in the single year 1925 (William Randolph Hearst bought many of these); these cash infusions did not prevent him from ending up, eventually, in a squalid rooming house in London, where he died a suicide in 1976.[61] Photographs of the Eyrecourt interior, by contrast, present an aesthetic larder that can only be described as “bare.” The artwork hanging on the walls appear to be family portraits for the most part (those reproduced in the Eyre hagiography, Signpost to Eyrecourt, are of mediocre quality); and the upper walls of the entryway reveal picture hooks, but no pictures, possibly indicating one or two sales for ready cash. The Eyres, it would appear, were minor art collectors at best; no van Dykes, Gainsboroughs, or sporting scenes by Charles Lutyens. Many of the lesser gentry, when they did purchase paintings, often did so in Dublin from dealers specializing in copies of Italian masters, but there is little indication that even this was the case with the Eyre family. As for libraries, whose richly bound copies of Greek and Latin classics always fetched good prices, the available evidence indicates there were none to be had at Eyrecourt. As Cumberland said of Baron Eyre, “He had no books.”[62]
Perhaps William Henry Gregory Eyre might have married better, a recourse frequently desired by the gentry of both Britain and Ireland for half a century, with generally uneven results. (Consuelo Vanderbilt, married to the ninth duke of Marlborough by her social-climbing mother in 1896, was not the satisfied woman portrayed by Sargent in his famous portrait of the couple with their two children; she came to the dinner table in the waning years of her marriage with a revolver, which she placed next to her plate and pointed at her husband).[63] When Eyre died in a Dublin nursing home on February 18, 1925, the only thing of any real value left was the monumental staircase. The questions became, did the Eyres appreciate its value, and even if they did, what were they to do with it?
As to the former query, we will never know. Eyre’s son, a military man who inherited the financial debacle of his father’s affairs, died in England in 1992, without leaving any published comment on something that had happened sixty-seven long years before. But it was likely he, representing his mother, who arranged the disposition of the staircase, or at least allowed himself to be advised as to its fate, no doubt by his estate manager, his lawyer, perhaps some relation with ready advice, or a combination of all three. No options were good options, nor had there been for several years. The land agent for the 7th earl of Granard, who held Castleforbes in County Longford, offered his client the usual bleak advice in a memo dated 1892: the earl’s Great House was “unsalable in the market and therefore valueless except as building material.”[64] This must have been a shocking piece of news to Granard, but one he had to swallow. In 1935 James Butler, 3rd Marquess of Ormonde, held an estate sale at the great Butler estate at Kilkenny, which generated about £6,000. He then abandoned the country for London, leaving the seat of his family uninhabited for some thirty years, when it was sold for £50 to the town. An English visitor compared Kilkenny Castle to “a weather-beaten ship in a storm, after a long voyage, with all her cargo thrown overboard.”[65]
Whatever the impetus (taxes and mortgage arrears, in all probability), the Eyrecourt staircase was sold off after Eyre’s death in 1926 by his heirs, dismantled and packed into crates, then shipped to London. The melancholy atmospherics of this financial quagmire brings to mind Lever’s novel, Charles O’Malley, where he writes, concerning similar circumstances, that “One thing was clear: the whole estates of the family could not possibly pay one-fourth of the debt, and the only question was one which occasionally arises at a scanty dinner on a mail-coach road – who was to be the lucky individual to carve the joint, where so many were sure to go off hungry.”[66] The man who benefited from this impoverished larder was William Randolph Hearst.
WHR, or “Willie”
An only child, William Randolph Hearst was born in San Francisco,1863, to a rough and ready speculator in western mining interests, one George Hearst, and his much younger wife, née Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson. The elder Hearst made and lost fortunes during his long and colorful career, much of it spent prospecting alone far from the madding crowd, or putting together deals in the less than salubrious environs of frontier camps in Wyoming and Utah. His wife cultivated more refined interests, and indeed their marriage became more one of convenience than affection as the years passed by. Phoebe was rarely to be seen in places like Hangtown or Virginia City, preferring to spend her time in comfortable townhouses in and around San Francisco. George Hearst never hesitated paying the bills, however, and when his wife determined on a Grand Tour of Europe he readily agreed, not so much to please her as to please his ten-year-old son. George, having no interest in the decadent life styles of kings and queens, and even less in Shakespeare, stayed behind to tend his business affairs. In the fall of 1873, Phoebe and William Randolph departed New York on the SS Adriatic. Accompanied by a tutor for “Willie,” they would be gone for twenty months.
This European adventure had a profoundly formulative influence on just about every aspect of Hearst’s developing character, traits that would affect his personal and professional life both positively and negatively in the years to come. Their first stop was Ireland (William did not care for Irish men folk, whom he noted were “bad to the women and horses”),[67] followed by long sojourns in Scotland, England, Belgium, Holland Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy (for six months), then finally to Paris (the Hôtel d’Albe on the Champs Élysées was their home there) before finally returning to San Francisco. Phoebe, as a budding intellectual and aesthete, was determined to show her son just about everything that ancient Europe had to offer, and became in effect a major domo of the tour, micromanaging every detail and making certain that no aesthetic stone was left unturned. Hours and hours of museum hopping, specialized introductions to art collections and cultural sights, visits to operas and plays, nothing was left to chance or idleness. Hearst’s natural curiosity in history and the arts was gratified at just about every turn, and so too his desire to own many of the lovely objects that he admired, a trait that turned compulsive as he grew older. George and Phoebe Hearst meaningfully shared only one thing in common, a desire to see their son’s every wish fulfilled. WRH later admitted that he was little more than an “American brat,” whose self-indulgence grew to proportions rarely seen before or after. Both parents were well aware, and indeed encouraged, his acquisitiveness. He collected everything, from comic books to beer steins to stamps. When “Willie feels bad,” his mother noted, “he goes out and buys something.” “I’ve been watching him,” his father added, “and I notice that when he wants cake, he wants cake, and he wants it now.” Neither parent saw any reason to curb their son’s precociousness.[68]
William Randolph Hearst dining in his Refectory at San Simeon, CA. Marion Davies is not in the photograph. Her chair (opposite WRH) is empty and pulled away from the table.
Spoiled though he was, WRH was no slouch. Well-educated, a hard worker, attentive to detail, maniacal in his obsessions, one great effect of his childhood marked every aspect of his extensive business and political career: he would not be denied. When his mother died in 1919, leaving the bulk of her estate to her beloved son (some $25 million), William Randolph Hearst was already a millionaire several times over. Inheriting his father’s willingness to slog through the trenches, he had entered the newspaper business with a vengeance, rarely the realm for a gentleman, and in the process revolutionized journalism in the United States.[69] In New York City he was more than willing to challenge the dominance of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and the two men engaged in what only can be described as a slugfest. Hearst and Pulitzer had both purchased ailing newspapers and transformed them into moneymakers. The key was circulation. Pulitzer, for example, had grown the readership of the World from 40,000 in 1883 to over 600,000; Hearst, with his New York Morning Journal, from 30,000 in 1895 to 1.2 million in just three years.
Circulation figures, as both men realized, meant advertising, and advertising meant revenue. Hearst especially became the master of hyperbole, anything to grab attention. Things taken for granted in today’s newspapers, whether “yellow” or legitimate, were largely initiated by Hearst, from ordinary items like weather reports, obituaries, weddings, gossip columns, comic strips, and sports coverage, to sensationalist exposes ranging from war news, crime blotters, sex scandals, all accentuated with editorials or pejorative opinion pieces that furthered Hearst’s various political views. These were all punctuated with bold, larger-than-life, punchy headlines, all intended to produce from its readers a “God Almighty” (as one of his editors put it).[70] A Hearst newspaper could be as prejudiced as a Fox News, or as earnest as a New York Times; as absurd and vicious as a below-the-belt political cartoon, or as heart-felt and progressive as any liberal fighting for an 8-hour work day. Hearst’s Sunday editions could run to 90 pages, full of everything a reader might want (free Want Ads were a Hearst invention), all for 5 cents a copy.[71] He even helped start a war, when the USS Maine was allegedly sabotaged in Havana’s harbor by nefarious Spain on February 15, 1898. Hearst became a great exponent of American imperialism, an internationalist posture that he would repudiate after World War I.
By 1904, WRH owned 8 newspapers in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, with some 2 million readers. He was 41 years old, and oblivious to what anybody thought about him or the way he did business. Over the following two decades he added 14 more papers and 4 magazines, valued at $44 million, and made huge investments in New York City real estate, radio stations and, as an added fillip to his portfolio, the burgeoning field of motion pictures.[72] Normal codes of behavior eluded his interest. After fifteen years of marriage and five sons, Hearst took up with the Hollywood movie star Marion Davies, and subsequently established two completely separate (and regal) domestic establishments, his wife refusing to even consider a divorce. The subsequent arrangements lasted on a relatively equitable basis until Hearst’s death in 1951.
By the time of the Great Depression, Hearst had been at the forefront of American journalism and public affairs for some four decades. The Midas touch had eluded him in the realm of politics, however. He did win two elections to the United Stares Congress in 1903 and ‘05, but other hard-fought campaigns for the mayor and governorship of New York City and State respectively, as well as continued flirtations with running for president, were abject failures despite the millions of dollars expended and the sometimes hysteric support of his media outlets. Efforts to be a kingmaker also failed miserably. The long list of his endorsed candidates who lost to the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman presents a melancholy reminder of his diminished influence as he aged.
Hearst recharged his batteries after these myriad and difficult battles by doing what he enjoyed most, travelling to Europe, usually with large retinues of family and friends in tow, and purchasing just about anything that caught his eye. Like his mother, he was a professional tour guide, planning each visit with detailed itineraries designed to encompass just about every conceivable point of interest that any destination might provide (the results could be mixed, Marion Davies noting in her diary on one occasion that “I was bored stiff. All I wanted was an ice-cream soda or a Coke”).[73] Cost was never considered. His summer trip to the continent in 1928 saw 27 trunks of personal effects delivered to the New York pier where the RMS Olympic lay berthed. When he returned from these trips, months later, ready to resume his battles with foes real and imagined, he was generally accompanied by mountains of spoil, be it armor, fine silver, lace, Old Master paintings, statuary, china, tapestries, fountains, anything antique, entire period rooms and even buildings. In 1911 he purchased Tattershall Castle in the fens district near Boston, intending to dismantle the entire structure and re-erect it in the United States. Fourteen years later he instructed his agents to buy St. Donat’s Castle in Wales, sitting on 111 acres (he had never seen the place, but pictures of it in the magazine Country Life looked good to him). By 1922, Hearst leased or owned several warehousing units on both the east and west coasts of the United States. In New York alone, his storage fees ran to $80,000 annually. It was said of Hearst that he never “visited” Europe per se, but “invaded” it.[74]
The bare recital of such extravagance might suggest an impression of gaucherie or noveau riche pretensions, but Hearst was above all that. He had a fine eye and was a genuine collector. That he harbored few notions of restraint should not cloud the fact that his aesthetic judgment was generally sound, if indeed somewhat ostentatious, and impossible to categorize or restrain within a single time frame or architectural discipline. If he liked something, no matter the period, he bought it. His similarity with Wagner’s patron, Ludwig II, the king of Bavaria, is apt only insofar as Ludwig was mad, and Hearst merely self-assured and self-indulgent, though on a scale almost unparalleled.
One prod that energized Hearst’s buying spree was the creation of his “masterpiece,” the complex known as San Simeon, on a remote and splendid estate halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on acreage that his father had begun assembling in 1865 (George Hearst’s initial purchase of 40,000 acres was enlarged by his son to eventually encompass 250,000 acres, encompassing some fourteen miles of oceanfront). Once Hearst’s liaison with Marion Davies became more or less permanent, his desire to reside in New York (where his wife lived, in splendid circumstances) lessened appreciably. His devotion to Davies and, by extension, his desire to enlarge her career, prompted him to spend more time in California, primarily in and around Hollywood, where he purchased or had built two extravagant properties, and at San Simenon as a retreat (his pied-à-terre for Davies, a complex he built on the beach in Santa Monica, featured over 55 two-bedroom suites with baths).[75] In building this mansion, 75 woodcutters were, at one time, employed on site just to work on banisters. He intended to build at San Simeon a residence of such splendor that it would eclipse anything the Medici had ever done.[76]
The desire to recreate luxury on the scale of European monarchies – or, to put it more aptly, to incorporate European elements into structures that almost doubled as museums – was a common compulsion among the industrialists, robber barons, and millionaires who crowd the pages of American history at the turn of the century and beyond. On a spectacular site overlooking the sea at Gloucester, Massachusetts, the inventor John Hays Hammond (torpedo guidance systems, dirigibles, mines and mine laying, among many other military and musical innovations) created a “castle” replete with doorways, massive chimney, and architectural “stuff” (his phrase) collected during repeated trips to Europe.[77] Manhattan island saw the creation of one fabulous mansion after another, including, as but one example, the Frick palazzo on Fifth Avenue. When the weather turned sultry, eyes turned to Newport, Rhode Island where, as Henry James put it, nature’s splendor grew corrupted “by the clink of money itself in the murmur of the breezy little waves at the foot of the cliff.” Newport today remains a museum set of monumental buildings, many copied from European counterparts, though Edith Wharton found many of these “smothered in senseless architectural trivialities.”[78] San Simeon, however, was of a different scale altogether.
San Simeon, begun in 1919, was a prototypically Hearst creation, and in many ways a reflection of his sensationalist newspapers: loud, over-the-top, impossible to ignore. The complex encompassed a twin-towered and imposing central building visible from miles away (and reminiscent, in that respect, of a medieval cathedral), with an elaborate assemblage of guesthouses, formal gardens, fountains, and the largest private zoo in the United Stares at its foot. The entryway to the estate was over five miles in length. Guests of a weekend, who could number over 65, would be met at a private railroad station, motored to the complex, and serviced by a veritable army of valets and maids, with every luxury available (except a surfeit of alcohol, strictly regulated by the host who generally allowed each visitor a single cocktail at dinner). The reception and dining rooms, as well as the library, were medieval “recreations,” the ceilings, paneled walls and floors of which were mostly purchased in Europe, disassembled, then put back together on site. Doorways, chimneys, outdoor facades, a cascading array of rare and unusual artifacts including ancient Egyptian statuary, were positioned everywhere that a visitor might wander. The enormous swimming pool, 58’ x 95’, and lined with Grecian style tiles, held 345,000 gallons of water, overlooked by the façade of a Roman temple purchased in Italy. Every detail in the creation of San Simeon was personally supervised by Hearst, who often wrote multi-page letters of instruction to his on-site architect. No detail was too small for the meticulous tycoon, and no whim left unsatisfied. By the mid-1930s, his construction budget was running in the vicinity of $50,000 per month.[79] The guests who were overwhelmed by his creation encompassed just about every facet of American society, though heavily weighted towards luminaries in the motion picture business and politicians. A partial list includes the “America First” stalwart Charles Lindberg, actors Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplain, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, MGM boss Louis Mayer, Winston Churchill, and two presidents (Coolidge and Roosevelt), along with lesser lights too numerous to mention. Whether they were deluged by the extravagance of it all, or left speechless by its overstatement, there is no denying the shock value of the concept, and the incredible zest that drove its creator to finish it.
Circulation figures, as both men realized, meant advertising, and advertising meant revenue. Hearst especially became the master of hyperbole, anything to grab attention. Things taken for granted in today’s newspapers, whether “yellow” or legitimate, were largely initiated by Hearst, from ordinary items like weather reports, obituaries, weddings, gossip columns, comic strips, and sports coverage, to sensationalist exposes ranging from war news, crime blotters, sex scandals, all accentuated with editorials or pejorative opinion pieces that furthered Hearst’s various political views. These were all punctuated with bold, larger-than-life, punchy headlines, all intended to produce from its readers a “God Almighty” (as one of his editors put it).[70] A Hearst newspaper could be as prejudiced as a Fox News, or as earnest as a New York Times; as absurd and vicious as a below-the-belt political cartoon, or as heart-felt and progressive as any liberal fighting for an 8-hour work day. Hearst’s Sunday editions could run to 90 pages, full of everything a reader might want (free Want Ads were a Hearst invention), all for 5 cents a copy.[71] He even helped start a war, when the USS Maine was allegedly sabotaged in Havana’s harbor by nefarious Spain on February 15, 1898. Hearst became a great exponent of American imperialism, an internationalist posture that he would repudiate after World War I.
By 1904, WRH owned 8 newspapers in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, with some 2 million readers. He was 41 years old, and oblivious to what anybody thought about him or the way he did business. Over the following two decades he added 14 more papers and 4 magazines, valued at $44 million, and made huge investments in New York City real estate, radio stations and, as an added fillip to his portfolio, the burgeoning field of motion pictures.[72] Normal codes of behavior eluded his interest. After fifteen years of marriage and five sons, Hearst took up with the Hollywood movie star Marion Davies, and subsequently established two completely separate (and regal) domestic establishments, his wife refusing to even consider a divorce. The subsequent arrangements lasted on a relatively equitable basis until Hearst’s death in 1951.
By the time of the Great Depression, Hearst had been at the forefront of American journalism and public affairs for some four decades. The Midas touch had eluded him in the realm of politics, however. He did win two elections to the United Stares Congress in 1903 and ‘05, but other hard-fought campaigns for the mayor and governorship of New York City and State respectively, as well as continued flirtations with running for president, were abject failures despite the millions of dollars expended and the sometimes hysteric support of his media outlets. Efforts to be a kingmaker also failed miserably. The long list of his endorsed candidates who lost to the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman presents a melancholy reminder of his diminished influence as he aged.
Hearst recharged his batteries after these myriad and difficult battles by doing what he enjoyed most, travelling to Europe, usually with large retinues of family and friends in tow, and purchasing just about anything that caught his eye. Like his mother, he was a professional tour guide, planning each visit with detailed itineraries designed to encompass just about every conceivable point of interest that any destination might provide (the results could be mixed, Marion Davies noting in her diary on one occasion that “I was bored stiff. All I wanted was an ice-cream soda or a Coke”).[73] Cost was never considered. His summer trip to the continent in 1928 saw 27 trunks of personal effects delivered to the New York pier where the RMS Olympic lay berthed. When he returned from these trips, months later, ready to resume his battles with foes real and imagined, he was generally accompanied by mountains of spoil, be it armor, fine silver, lace, Old Master paintings, statuary, china, tapestries, fountains, anything antique, entire period rooms and even buildings. In 1911 he purchased Tattershall Castle in the fens district near Boston, intending to dismantle the entire structure and re-erect it in the United States. Fourteen years later he instructed his agents to buy St. Donat’s Castle in Wales, sitting on 111 acres (he had never seen the place, but pictures of it in the magazine Country Life looked good to him). By 1922, Hearst leased or owned several warehousing units on both the east and west coasts of the United States. In New York alone, his storage fees ran to $80,000 annually. It was said of Hearst that he never “visited” Europe per se, but “invaded” it.[74]
The bare recital of such extravagance might suggest an impression of gaucherie or noveau riche pretensions, but Hearst was above all that. He had a fine eye and was a genuine collector. That he harbored few notions of restraint should not cloud the fact that his aesthetic judgment was generally sound, if indeed somewhat ostentatious, and impossible to categorize or restrain within a single time frame or architectural discipline. If he liked something, no matter the period, he bought it. His similarity with Wagner’s patron, Ludwig II, the king of Bavaria, is apt only insofar as Ludwig was mad, and Hearst merely self-assured and self-indulgent, though on a scale almost unparalleled.
One prod that energized Hearst’s buying spree was the creation of his “masterpiece,” the complex known as San Simeon, on a remote and splendid estate halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on acreage that his father had begun assembling in 1865 (George Hearst’s initial purchase of 40,000 acres was enlarged by his son to eventually encompass 250,000 acres, encompassing some fourteen miles of oceanfront). Once Hearst’s liaison with Marion Davies became more or less permanent, his desire to reside in New York (where his wife lived, in splendid circumstances) lessened appreciably. His devotion to Davies and, by extension, his desire to enlarge her career, prompted him to spend more time in California, primarily in and around Hollywood, where he purchased or had built two extravagant properties, and at San Simenon as a retreat (his pied-à-terre for Davies, a complex he built on the beach in Santa Monica, featured over 55 two-bedroom suites with baths).[75] In building this mansion, 75 woodcutters were, at one time, employed on site just to work on banisters. He intended to build at San Simeon a residence of such splendor that it would eclipse anything the Medici had ever done.[76]
The desire to recreate luxury on the scale of European monarchies – or, to put it more aptly, to incorporate European elements into structures that almost doubled as museums – was a common compulsion among the industrialists, robber barons, and millionaires who crowd the pages of American history at the turn of the century and beyond. On a spectacular site overlooking the sea at Gloucester, Massachusetts, the inventor John Hays Hammond (torpedo guidance systems, dirigibles, mines and mine laying, among many other military and musical innovations) created a “castle” replete with doorways, massive chimney, and architectural “stuff” (his phrase) collected during repeated trips to Europe.[77] Manhattan island saw the creation of one fabulous mansion after another, including, as but one example, the Frick palazzo on Fifth Avenue. When the weather turned sultry, eyes turned to Newport, Rhode Island where, as Henry James put it, nature’s splendor grew corrupted “by the clink of money itself in the murmur of the breezy little waves at the foot of the cliff.” Newport today remains a museum set of monumental buildings, many copied from European counterparts, though Edith Wharton found many of these “smothered in senseless architectural trivialities.”[78] San Simeon, however, was of a different scale altogether.
San Simeon, begun in 1919, was a prototypically Hearst creation, and in many ways a reflection of his sensationalist newspapers: loud, over-the-top, impossible to ignore. The complex encompassed a twin-towered and imposing central building visible from miles away (and reminiscent, in that respect, of a medieval cathedral), with an elaborate assemblage of guesthouses, formal gardens, fountains, and the largest private zoo in the United Stares at its foot. The entryway to the estate was over five miles in length. Guests of a weekend, who could number over 65, would be met at a private railroad station, motored to the complex, and serviced by a veritable army of valets and maids, with every luxury available (except a surfeit of alcohol, strictly regulated by the host who generally allowed each visitor a single cocktail at dinner). The reception and dining rooms, as well as the library, were medieval “recreations,” the ceilings, paneled walls and floors of which were mostly purchased in Europe, disassembled, then put back together on site. Doorways, chimneys, outdoor facades, a cascading array of rare and unusual artifacts including ancient Egyptian statuary, were positioned everywhere that a visitor might wander. The enormous swimming pool, 58’ x 95’, and lined with Grecian style tiles, held 345,000 gallons of water, overlooked by the façade of a Roman temple purchased in Italy. Every detail in the creation of San Simeon was personally supervised by Hearst, who often wrote multi-page letters of instruction to his on-site architect. No detail was too small for the meticulous tycoon, and no whim left unsatisfied. By the mid-1930s, his construction budget was running in the vicinity of $50,000 per month.[79] The guests who were overwhelmed by his creation encompassed just about every facet of American society, though heavily weighted towards luminaries in the motion picture business and politicians. A partial list includes the “America First” stalwart Charles Lindberg, actors Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplain, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, MGM boss Louis Mayer, Winston Churchill, and two presidents (Coolidge and Roosevelt), along with lesser lights too numerous to mention. Whether they were deluged by the extravagance of it all, or left speechless by its overstatement, there is no denying the shock value of the concept, and the incredible zest that drove its creator to finish it.
WHR and two guests, Winston Churchill and the Hollywood film producer Louis B. Meyer, 1928, San Simeon, California.
Sir Charles Allom
The word “salvage” derives from the Old French salver, “to save,” but the undertone of its definition can be decidedly more ironic. Salvage can often have a more sinister meaning: something pulled from its organic source, something pillaged, looted, stolen, or pried loose -- in other words, seen from a different angle, a destructive element, the cause of demise or dissolution. To many architectural historians, the word “salvage” has sinister connotations.
History is full of episodes where cities, castles, and palaces have been put to the torch and razed. From Homer’s Iliad to the depiction by Polybius of Scipio’s destruction of Carthage, we have too many lurid examples from which to choose. What is rarely recorded, however, was what happened later, when the armies had gone and people appeared from nowhere to wander the ruins. What they were generally searching for were building materials, or anything useful that might go into reconstructing their lives. In a less dramatic sense, where life and death were not the issues, we can still discern the dynamic of salver in the footnotes of dramatic events. Between 1536 and 1540, Henry VIII dissolved over eight hundred monastic corporations in his domains, scattered their inhabitants to the winds, and either took their properties to market for ready cash, or granted same to his favorites or important lords whose support he needed. Many of these philistines plundered the actual monastic buildings for any and all of its valuables, stripping lead roofs, dismantling stonework and remaining great timbers, or transforming some of these buildings into palatial residences. It was, according to one historian, the “greatest single act of architectural vandalism in English, perhaps even in European history.”[80] In the light of what happened during the French Revolution of the 1790s this might be an overstatement, but not by much.
There is nothing unique in taking structural elements from one building and putting them into another. Sometimes the artifacts in question are historically significant, such as the stairway Mary Queen of Scots walked down at Fotheringhay Castle to her execution (now to be found in a hotel in Oundle, four miles away); others are relevant only in terms of their architectural provenance, such as the important Slaugham Place in Sussex, designed by John Thorpe during the reign of James I (before demolition, its staircase was bought by an innkeeper and installed in his place of business, which later became the town hall of Lewes).[81] Whatever the circumstances, builders have traditionally looked at properties for their location, the inherent quality of the building itself or its components, and whether a profit was to had in either renovation or demolition, with something more extravagant planned to take the site if the latter course was chosen. When Francis Bacon died in 1626, his lavish folly, Verulum House, was sold for £400 to two carpenters, who ripped out what Bacon had so lovingly installed, tore the place down, and built a new structure to replace it. This is commonly called “real estate speculation.” It is also not surprising, of course, that owners of older buildings might, at some point, depending on artistic or financial considerations, want something more up-to-date and comfortable than some cramped sixteenth century manor house that boasted few amenities but many maintenance issues. A survey done by Country Life at the turn of the century listed 267 significant houses from the Tudor period in England, of which half had disappeared.[82]
By the mid-nineteenth century, however, a new aesthetic began percolating within the world of architecture and design. Fueled in large measure by the imaginative tales penned by Alfred Lord Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott, a decidedly romantic element began appearing in both building projects and their interior decoration. New and lavish country houses in the British Isles presented as their almost subconscious inspiration the grandeur of Camelot, replete with battlemented towers, “medieval” gates, great halls, and grand entry rooms full of broad swords, axes, banners, armorial shields, and suits of armor, many of these displayed against salvaged wood panels, suitably blackened with age, often purchased from a wide variety of buildings being torn down. Scott’s Abbotsford, atmospherically located in the Scottish Borders, is a case in point. In Ireland, one of the finest examples is the now ruinous Dromore Castle in County Limerick, which sports, in suitably nationalistic fashion, its own round tower.[83] Not every home builder, of course, could afford to build an Ashford Castle, but the desire to be seen “in fashion” inspired many to incorporate a “Period Room” in their new home, a visible display of antiquity and legitimacy, a connection to the past provided, ironically, by the disappearance of its original, and historically more legitimate, predecessor.
A trade in such artifacts was in robust shape in the nineteenth century, where the gaze of collectors was also attuned to the continent. An important part of the antiquarian inventory came from France in the post-Revolutionary period, when monasteries and aristocratic mansions were frequent targets, at first by vandals, and then builders in search of materials, and of course to that great well of artistic grandeur, Italy. On a visit to Venice in 1837, Benjamin Disraeli noted that “Palaces are now daily broken up like old ships and their colossal spoils consigned to Hanway Yard and Bond Street whence, reburnished and vamped up, their Titanic proportions in time figure in the boudoirs and miniature salons of Mayfair and St. James’s. Many a fine lady now sits in a Doge’s chair.”[84]
In the initial stages of antiquarian acquisitiveness, and then carried over into the Victorian and Edwardian periods, historical accuracy often suffered, due both to the cupidity of dealers and the amateurism of their customers. Period rooms were often a mishmash of styles and eras, particularly during the craze for “great halls.” Anything associated with the touch of royalty was especially valued (and priced accordingly), whether real or imagined depending on the gullibility of a customer (as The Times noted sardonically, “It is striking how many places sold this year were visited by Queen Elizabeth”). In the lavish California “beach house” that Hearst began building for Marion Davies in 1926, a fireplace ensemble was installed, supposedly from Hatton Hall in Ireland, “the home of Oscar Wilde’s mother.” As the Knight of Glin pointed out, there was not, nor had there ever been, a country house by that name in Ireland.[85] Several derogatory terms began making their way through the trade – “Jacobogus” and “Tudorbethan” – which gives some notion of the game in play (as indeed, several dealers took their work to be).[86]
The economics of supply and demand came to a head around the turn of the twentieth century. Great industrial barons in the United Stares were building monumental town houses in New York and elsewhere that demanded the acquisition of suitable treasures to attract attention, enhance prestige, and project self-importance. They were joined by patrons and directors of a new cultural phenomenon on the scene, the museum, which joined in the hunt for European artifacts, in particular period rooms as mentioned above which, in later years, were often deemed embarrassing due to the mix-and-match proclivities of less than forthright dealers based in London (one of whom kept a workshop going in Ipswich where, with bits and pieces “from over a dozen places in different parts of England,” a period room could take shape –“all in a day’s work” was his motto).[87] Over eighty period rooms are displayed today between the collections of the Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums of Art in New York.[88] Thankfully, standards are now considerably higher then they were even fifty years ago.
On the supply side of the ledger, there were the usual contributors to what became a flood plain of architectural salvage, many already illustrated by the vicissitudes of families like the Eyres and their declining fortunes. Certainly political upheavals, years of mortgage encumbrances with associated debt ledgers and, lastly, fresh taxes in the form of crippling death duties (1894), all made hanging on to the family estate an often hopeless struggle. On top of all that came World War I.
The word “salvage” derives from the Old French salver, “to save,” but the undertone of its definition can be decidedly more ironic. Salvage can often have a more sinister meaning: something pulled from its organic source, something pillaged, looted, stolen, or pried loose -- in other words, seen from a different angle, a destructive element, the cause of demise or dissolution. To many architectural historians, the word “salvage” has sinister connotations.
History is full of episodes where cities, castles, and palaces have been put to the torch and razed. From Homer’s Iliad to the depiction by Polybius of Scipio’s destruction of Carthage, we have too many lurid examples from which to choose. What is rarely recorded, however, was what happened later, when the armies had gone and people appeared from nowhere to wander the ruins. What they were generally searching for were building materials, or anything useful that might go into reconstructing their lives. In a less dramatic sense, where life and death were not the issues, we can still discern the dynamic of salver in the footnotes of dramatic events. Between 1536 and 1540, Henry VIII dissolved over eight hundred monastic corporations in his domains, scattered their inhabitants to the winds, and either took their properties to market for ready cash, or granted same to his favorites or important lords whose support he needed. Many of these philistines plundered the actual monastic buildings for any and all of its valuables, stripping lead roofs, dismantling stonework and remaining great timbers, or transforming some of these buildings into palatial residences. It was, according to one historian, the “greatest single act of architectural vandalism in English, perhaps even in European history.”[80] In the light of what happened during the French Revolution of the 1790s this might be an overstatement, but not by much.
There is nothing unique in taking structural elements from one building and putting them into another. Sometimes the artifacts in question are historically significant, such as the stairway Mary Queen of Scots walked down at Fotheringhay Castle to her execution (now to be found in a hotel in Oundle, four miles away); others are relevant only in terms of their architectural provenance, such as the important Slaugham Place in Sussex, designed by John Thorpe during the reign of James I (before demolition, its staircase was bought by an innkeeper and installed in his place of business, which later became the town hall of Lewes).[81] Whatever the circumstances, builders have traditionally looked at properties for their location, the inherent quality of the building itself or its components, and whether a profit was to had in either renovation or demolition, with something more extravagant planned to take the site if the latter course was chosen. When Francis Bacon died in 1626, his lavish folly, Verulum House, was sold for £400 to two carpenters, who ripped out what Bacon had so lovingly installed, tore the place down, and built a new structure to replace it. This is commonly called “real estate speculation.” It is also not surprising, of course, that owners of older buildings might, at some point, depending on artistic or financial considerations, want something more up-to-date and comfortable than some cramped sixteenth century manor house that boasted few amenities but many maintenance issues. A survey done by Country Life at the turn of the century listed 267 significant houses from the Tudor period in England, of which half had disappeared.[82]
By the mid-nineteenth century, however, a new aesthetic began percolating within the world of architecture and design. Fueled in large measure by the imaginative tales penned by Alfred Lord Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott, a decidedly romantic element began appearing in both building projects and their interior decoration. New and lavish country houses in the British Isles presented as their almost subconscious inspiration the grandeur of Camelot, replete with battlemented towers, “medieval” gates, great halls, and grand entry rooms full of broad swords, axes, banners, armorial shields, and suits of armor, many of these displayed against salvaged wood panels, suitably blackened with age, often purchased from a wide variety of buildings being torn down. Scott’s Abbotsford, atmospherically located in the Scottish Borders, is a case in point. In Ireland, one of the finest examples is the now ruinous Dromore Castle in County Limerick, which sports, in suitably nationalistic fashion, its own round tower.[83] Not every home builder, of course, could afford to build an Ashford Castle, but the desire to be seen “in fashion” inspired many to incorporate a “Period Room” in their new home, a visible display of antiquity and legitimacy, a connection to the past provided, ironically, by the disappearance of its original, and historically more legitimate, predecessor.
A trade in such artifacts was in robust shape in the nineteenth century, where the gaze of collectors was also attuned to the continent. An important part of the antiquarian inventory came from France in the post-Revolutionary period, when monasteries and aristocratic mansions were frequent targets, at first by vandals, and then builders in search of materials, and of course to that great well of artistic grandeur, Italy. On a visit to Venice in 1837, Benjamin Disraeli noted that “Palaces are now daily broken up like old ships and their colossal spoils consigned to Hanway Yard and Bond Street whence, reburnished and vamped up, their Titanic proportions in time figure in the boudoirs and miniature salons of Mayfair and St. James’s. Many a fine lady now sits in a Doge’s chair.”[84]
In the initial stages of antiquarian acquisitiveness, and then carried over into the Victorian and Edwardian periods, historical accuracy often suffered, due both to the cupidity of dealers and the amateurism of their customers. Period rooms were often a mishmash of styles and eras, particularly during the craze for “great halls.” Anything associated with the touch of royalty was especially valued (and priced accordingly), whether real or imagined depending on the gullibility of a customer (as The Times noted sardonically, “It is striking how many places sold this year were visited by Queen Elizabeth”). In the lavish California “beach house” that Hearst began building for Marion Davies in 1926, a fireplace ensemble was installed, supposedly from Hatton Hall in Ireland, “the home of Oscar Wilde’s mother.” As the Knight of Glin pointed out, there was not, nor had there ever been, a country house by that name in Ireland.[85] Several derogatory terms began making their way through the trade – “Jacobogus” and “Tudorbethan” – which gives some notion of the game in play (as indeed, several dealers took their work to be).[86]
The economics of supply and demand came to a head around the turn of the twentieth century. Great industrial barons in the United Stares were building monumental town houses in New York and elsewhere that demanded the acquisition of suitable treasures to attract attention, enhance prestige, and project self-importance. They were joined by patrons and directors of a new cultural phenomenon on the scene, the museum, which joined in the hunt for European artifacts, in particular period rooms as mentioned above which, in later years, were often deemed embarrassing due to the mix-and-match proclivities of less than forthright dealers based in London (one of whom kept a workshop going in Ipswich where, with bits and pieces “from over a dozen places in different parts of England,” a period room could take shape –“all in a day’s work” was his motto).[87] Over eighty period rooms are displayed today between the collections of the Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums of Art in New York.[88] Thankfully, standards are now considerably higher then they were even fifty years ago.
On the supply side of the ledger, there were the usual contributors to what became a flood plain of architectural salvage, many already illustrated by the vicissitudes of families like the Eyres and their declining fortunes. Certainly political upheavals, years of mortgage encumbrances with associated debt ledgers and, lastly, fresh taxes in the form of crippling death duties (1894), all made hanging on to the family estate an often hopeless struggle. On top of all that came World War I.
A disassembled “period” room, awaiting museum installation.
“Vanity Fair” caricature of Sir Charles Allom, titled “Istria,” 6 August 1913.
Some historians have minimized the effect of this great cataclysm on the fortunes of the landed gentry, but in many respects it represents something of the “last straw,” if not in terms of financial ruin, at least in its psychological effect. The decimation of the British officer corps, whether in the trench warfare of France or Belgium or on the beaches of the Dardanelles, is beyond dispute; also beyond dispute is that nearly every landed family in the British Isles had a son, cousin or nephew in uniform somewhere. Something like ten percent of all titled families in Great Britain lost their heir as a battlefield casualty, to say nothing of younger sons and the progeny of the lesser gentry. They were the lifeblood of the local aristocratic order and, to some degree, its future. Instead of youthful vigor and determination to set the house in order, however, often the responsibilities of coping with the new, postwar reality fell on the shoulders of older generations that were not up to the task.[89] Beginning in 1920, the loss in Big House “inventory” began in earnest, starting a trend that would see five hundred at least disappear in England alone; after World War II, another seven hundred. In Ireland the trend was quicker and more extreme, given the destruction of “the Troubles” and civil war.[90] A dealer in London, Charles Lockhart Roberson, stated the dilemma succinctly (actually, a business opportunity for him), when he noted in an advertisement from 1924 that “in these days … many of the Estates and Country seats of the nobility are changing hands [and] there are many heirloom furnishings, tapestries and art objects which owners wish to dispose of.” In that year alone, Anderson had sixty period rooms for sale, nine of which were purchased by Hearst.[91] In many cases, gentry were desperate to sell out. The earl of Powis could not give away his seat, Lymore Hall, built in 1675; he offered it rent-free for life to whomever would invest enough money to keep it standing. It did not help his cause when he and twenty-five guests simply disappeared into the cellar as the floor of the main reception room collapsed under their weight. The house was demolished in 1931.[92]
A new and specialized breed of entrepreneur now stepped forward to broker the exchange of these goods from old, lineaged hands into those of what many could only charitably call arrivistes, or new money. This was the interior decorator, and he was a British “invention” without an equivalency in the American market.[93] In the 1913 edition of the Post Office London Directory, there were four individuals listed who described themselves as such; in 1921, there were one hundred and twenty-one.[94] Some of these were mere bric-a-brac dealers, but others were decidedly higher end and charged for their services accordingly, one of whom was Charles Carrick Allom.
Allom, born in 1865, came from an artistic family of architects and portrait painters (he was descended from the miniaturist Thomas Carrick, whose subjects included Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Thomas Carlyle, among other notables). After studying at the Royal College of Art, and then travelling extensively in France and Italy, he started his own firm of interior decoration in London, White & Allom, where he soon became known as something of a classicist (some might term it “old-fashioned”), preferring a more restrained style than the floridity into which the “gothic” had descended. He was soon the most fashionable interior designer in the city, abetted by his perfect sense of decorum and a nose for social climbing, abetted in large measure by sporting proclivities. Allom played rugby, cricket, golf, rowed sculls well into middle age and, most importantly, he sailed. In the 1912 season in various European regattas, his yacht Istria won thirty races out of thirty-one starts, earning him the attention, and friendship, of another avid sailor, the king, whose wife hired him to refurbish several rooms in Buckingham Palace. For services rendered he was knighted in 1913. It helped enormously that Allom was both politically conservative (and not afraid to say it) and stylistically retrograde. “Modernity contaminates everything” and smacked of bolshevism, he once told a reporter. He called the important sculpture, Consummatum Est by Jacob Epstein, “a disgusting travesty and outrage on Christian ideals.”[95]
The man who formidably abetted Allom’s career was the famous art deal Joseph Duveen, whose keen eye, gracious manners, and endless ambition led to some of the most spectacular business dealings ever seen in the rarefied world of antiques and Old Master paintings. His list of clients was a who’s who of the American ultra rich – John D. Rockefeller, J. Paul Getty, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and of course William Randolph Hearst. When Duveen signed on as Henry Clay Frick’s personal art consultant, choosing extraordinary paintings to adorn Frick’s grandiose “palace” on New York’s Fifth Avenue, he brought Allom in his train, his “favorite interior decorator,” according to one historian.[96] With business booming, Allom opened a showroom on Madison Avenue where he displayed European furniture, tapestries, antiques, and assorted decorative items.[97] He was always on the lookout for fresh material. When Wren’s Church of St Matthew Friday Street in London was torn down, Allom was there, purchasing Edward Pearce’s magnificent reredos (or altar screen), which he then sold to the famous Edwardian socialite, Margaret Greville, for installation at her country mansion in Surrey, Polesden Lacey. Quick turnaround meant quick profits.
Allom’s collaboration with Hearst began in 1924, when Hearst purchased two complete rooms, one for $11,305, the other for $22,000.[98] Their collaboration shifted into higher gear when Allom was hired to redo and modernize St. Donat’s Castle in Wales, one of Hearst’s largest “impulse” purchases. This was a formidable challenge, given the castle’s size, medieval construction, and almost complete lack of amenities, but Hearst’s formidable wallet had a way of making difficulties disappear. Allom created fifty-five guest bedrooms, many with toilet facilities en suite (a novelty at the time), had the place wired for electricity, ensured that when hot water faucets were turned on, hot water actually materialized (another novelty), and turned the reception rooms and great hall into museum-quality showplaces. The “banqueting hall” and associated entryway, for example, contain elements from Tudor houses in Somerset and Lincolnshire, juxtaposed with a magnificent sixteenth-century French fireplace salvaged from a chateau in Beauvais, Picardy. The overall impression is formidable, however historically inappropriate the marriage. But Allom, as he would have been the first to admit, was an interior decorator, not an art historian. He did not have, as Duveen did, a Bernard Berenson in the wings to authenticate the provenance of Renaissance paintings. Allom cared only that things looked good and made the appropriate impression. He and his team did not stop there. A painted ceiling from a parish church in Boston was completely removed and reinstalled at St. Donat’s, as well as significant portions of the architectural fabric of Bradenstoke Priory in Wiltshire. That Benedictine foundation’s brick tithe barn was also dismantled, brick by brick, in what one commentator called a “desecration.”[99] One of the more modest contributions to St. Donat’s décor was some paneling from Eyrecourt Castle. In keeping with notions that much Baroque interior styling was originally painted, Allom had the wood stripped and then refreshed with coats of green and silver, and so it remains to this day.[100] George Bernard Shaw, after spending a lavish weekend at St. Donat’s as a guest of Hearst, quipped that this was what God would have done if he had the money.
The 1920s saw a tremendous upsurge in antique building materials crossing the Atlantic, a trend that for the next four decades would represent the “largest movement of architectural and decorative salvages in history.”[101] The Depression, of course, which wiped out the portfolios of several hundred of the landed gentry all over the British Isles, accelerated this process. What the sculptor George Gray Barnard began just before World War I when he shipped 120 crates of his “Gothic collection” out of France – church fragments, arches, stone mantles and so on, the basis of what later became the Cloisters Museum in New York – was just the beginning. In Bernard’s case, the French government, concerned about what many considered simple looting, passed legislation to prohibit the export of certain protected artifacts, but in Britain there was little sense of alarm. The editor of London-based Connoisseur Magazine was sanguine about the enormous domestic inventory in the realm, certain that it could stand the transfer of a few of its treasures overseas to the United States. He was continually amazed, he said to a reporter, at the unexpected possessions he came across in people’s homes, whether titled or not made no difference. “We are constantly finding wonderful things,” continuing on to remark that, “certainly we can’t think of the Duke of Westminster giving up his Blue Boy by Gainsborough,” which is exactly what the duke did in 1921, selling the portrait to Duveen for the then unheard of price, £170,000, who then turned it over to Henry Edwards Huntington, an American businessman and real estate developer based in Los Angeles, in a transaction that earned him a £12,000 commission.[102] It was a simple equation, according to Duveen: “Europe had plenty of art and Americans plenty of money.” When the Titanic went down, she took 30 tons of architectural salvage with her, shipped by the London art dealer Thomas Rohan, “ancient oak I had so lovingly handled lying fathoms in the deep, a loss to humanity.”[103]
As we have seen, Ireland was prime hunting ground for dealers like Allom, a man who was adept at squirreling out gossip and shoptalk about by who might be selling and what they might have to offer. Duveen, for instance, frequently kept butlers, maids, and trades people to the aristocracy on his payroll, to make certain he heard it first if a particular family’s finances might soon force a parting of the ways with some important painting or heirloom, and Allom was the same way. His impressions of Ireland, or better put, what we know about them as they appeared in print, appear superficial to be sure. An incident that involved him in the lobby of New York’s Regis Hotel, where he had lived for several years during his travels to the United States, reveals a condescending and paternalistic attitude to be sure. Eamon de Valera had travelled to New York in 1919 as Sinn Fein’s semiofficial ambassador to the Irish-American diaspora, raising money and ramping up enthusiasm for the cause. Two sixteen year old girls (one Sheila O’Malley and her friend, Margaret Clapton), set up a table in the St. Regis lobby to solicit contributions, a presence that enraged Allom as he appeared for lunch (his passions enflamed, perhaps, by the facts that his eldest daughter had died of a bronchial infection serving as a nurse in 1918, and that during the war he had shifted from his business activity as a decorator to one of aircraft and munitions production). A loud and vocal argument ensued, Allom demanding whether the teenagers supported the Irish Rebellion, as had the kaiser and that traitor Roger Casement, their response being they supported the Irish Republic. Three porters, “who admitted Irish parentage,” then ejected Allom from the hotel, which elicited a fine stream of outrage from the esteemed gentleman. De Valera, when informed of the contre-temps, reportedly “enjoyed [himself] hugely,” and no doubt shook his head in sad resignation when Allom had a letter printed in the New York Times wondering why, in heaven’s name, the Irish people were so discontented. “Only a few weeks ago I was in Ireland and never saw such obvious signs of prosperity. Cottages, farms, and houses in excellent repair and mostly newly painted...To talk of a downtrodden people is ridiculous.” Allom blamed Roman Catholic priests for the sorry situation.[104]
How he heard about the Eyre family will probably never be known; perhaps he, or one of his agents, noted the obituary of William Henry Gregory Eyre that ran in The Irish Times on 21 February, 1925, and made further inquiries. Perhaps he noted the catalogue printed by a firm of auctioneers out of Portumna, L. Taylor & Sons, announcing an estate sale at Eyrecourt Castle scheduled for May 4, 1926.[105] Whatever the case, he was there, checkbook in hand. We know for certain the famous stairway was purchased, and also the paneling and chimney surrounds of the drawing room. Whether he bought elements from the landing of the piano nobile, and any other artifacts, is unknown, but he probably did. The stairway ensemble was dismantled, by whom no record exists, but in all likelihood workmen brought over from England, and packed into crates for shipment to London, from whence they were transferred to California to be installed at San Simeon. The drawing room, also taken apart, was reassembled in the summer of 1928 as an exhibit at a huge antiques trade show at the Olympia exhibition venue in Kensington, sponsored by London’s Daily Telegraph, Allom serving as one of the directors. The Eryecourt ensemble stood as “The Charles II Room,” and was furnished with varying examples of “Jacobean” furniture, many lent by Allom (and, of course, for sale in his firm’s booth). The Eyrecourt “room” was featured in one of Allom’s advertisements in the show catalogue, which is the last record anyone has ever seen of it.[106]
A new and specialized breed of entrepreneur now stepped forward to broker the exchange of these goods from old, lineaged hands into those of what many could only charitably call arrivistes, or new money. This was the interior decorator, and he was a British “invention” without an equivalency in the American market.[93] In the 1913 edition of the Post Office London Directory, there were four individuals listed who described themselves as such; in 1921, there were one hundred and twenty-one.[94] Some of these were mere bric-a-brac dealers, but others were decidedly higher end and charged for their services accordingly, one of whom was Charles Carrick Allom.
Allom, born in 1865, came from an artistic family of architects and portrait painters (he was descended from the miniaturist Thomas Carrick, whose subjects included Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Thomas Carlyle, among other notables). After studying at the Royal College of Art, and then travelling extensively in France and Italy, he started his own firm of interior decoration in London, White & Allom, where he soon became known as something of a classicist (some might term it “old-fashioned”), preferring a more restrained style than the floridity into which the “gothic” had descended. He was soon the most fashionable interior designer in the city, abetted by his perfect sense of decorum and a nose for social climbing, abetted in large measure by sporting proclivities. Allom played rugby, cricket, golf, rowed sculls well into middle age and, most importantly, he sailed. In the 1912 season in various European regattas, his yacht Istria won thirty races out of thirty-one starts, earning him the attention, and friendship, of another avid sailor, the king, whose wife hired him to refurbish several rooms in Buckingham Palace. For services rendered he was knighted in 1913. It helped enormously that Allom was both politically conservative (and not afraid to say it) and stylistically retrograde. “Modernity contaminates everything” and smacked of bolshevism, he once told a reporter. He called the important sculpture, Consummatum Est by Jacob Epstein, “a disgusting travesty and outrage on Christian ideals.”[95]
The man who formidably abetted Allom’s career was the famous art deal Joseph Duveen, whose keen eye, gracious manners, and endless ambition led to some of the most spectacular business dealings ever seen in the rarefied world of antiques and Old Master paintings. His list of clients was a who’s who of the American ultra rich – John D. Rockefeller, J. Paul Getty, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and of course William Randolph Hearst. When Duveen signed on as Henry Clay Frick’s personal art consultant, choosing extraordinary paintings to adorn Frick’s grandiose “palace” on New York’s Fifth Avenue, he brought Allom in his train, his “favorite interior decorator,” according to one historian.[96] With business booming, Allom opened a showroom on Madison Avenue where he displayed European furniture, tapestries, antiques, and assorted decorative items.[97] He was always on the lookout for fresh material. When Wren’s Church of St Matthew Friday Street in London was torn down, Allom was there, purchasing Edward Pearce’s magnificent reredos (or altar screen), which he then sold to the famous Edwardian socialite, Margaret Greville, for installation at her country mansion in Surrey, Polesden Lacey. Quick turnaround meant quick profits.
Allom’s collaboration with Hearst began in 1924, when Hearst purchased two complete rooms, one for $11,305, the other for $22,000.[98] Their collaboration shifted into higher gear when Allom was hired to redo and modernize St. Donat’s Castle in Wales, one of Hearst’s largest “impulse” purchases. This was a formidable challenge, given the castle’s size, medieval construction, and almost complete lack of amenities, but Hearst’s formidable wallet had a way of making difficulties disappear. Allom created fifty-five guest bedrooms, many with toilet facilities en suite (a novelty at the time), had the place wired for electricity, ensured that when hot water faucets were turned on, hot water actually materialized (another novelty), and turned the reception rooms and great hall into museum-quality showplaces. The “banqueting hall” and associated entryway, for example, contain elements from Tudor houses in Somerset and Lincolnshire, juxtaposed with a magnificent sixteenth-century French fireplace salvaged from a chateau in Beauvais, Picardy. The overall impression is formidable, however historically inappropriate the marriage. But Allom, as he would have been the first to admit, was an interior decorator, not an art historian. He did not have, as Duveen did, a Bernard Berenson in the wings to authenticate the provenance of Renaissance paintings. Allom cared only that things looked good and made the appropriate impression. He and his team did not stop there. A painted ceiling from a parish church in Boston was completely removed and reinstalled at St. Donat’s, as well as significant portions of the architectural fabric of Bradenstoke Priory in Wiltshire. That Benedictine foundation’s brick tithe barn was also dismantled, brick by brick, in what one commentator called a “desecration.”[99] One of the more modest contributions to St. Donat’s décor was some paneling from Eyrecourt Castle. In keeping with notions that much Baroque interior styling was originally painted, Allom had the wood stripped and then refreshed with coats of green and silver, and so it remains to this day.[100] George Bernard Shaw, after spending a lavish weekend at St. Donat’s as a guest of Hearst, quipped that this was what God would have done if he had the money.
The 1920s saw a tremendous upsurge in antique building materials crossing the Atlantic, a trend that for the next four decades would represent the “largest movement of architectural and decorative salvages in history.”[101] The Depression, of course, which wiped out the portfolios of several hundred of the landed gentry all over the British Isles, accelerated this process. What the sculptor George Gray Barnard began just before World War I when he shipped 120 crates of his “Gothic collection” out of France – church fragments, arches, stone mantles and so on, the basis of what later became the Cloisters Museum in New York – was just the beginning. In Bernard’s case, the French government, concerned about what many considered simple looting, passed legislation to prohibit the export of certain protected artifacts, but in Britain there was little sense of alarm. The editor of London-based Connoisseur Magazine was sanguine about the enormous domestic inventory in the realm, certain that it could stand the transfer of a few of its treasures overseas to the United States. He was continually amazed, he said to a reporter, at the unexpected possessions he came across in people’s homes, whether titled or not made no difference. “We are constantly finding wonderful things,” continuing on to remark that, “certainly we can’t think of the Duke of Westminster giving up his Blue Boy by Gainsborough,” which is exactly what the duke did in 1921, selling the portrait to Duveen for the then unheard of price, £170,000, who then turned it over to Henry Edwards Huntington, an American businessman and real estate developer based in Los Angeles, in a transaction that earned him a £12,000 commission.[102] It was a simple equation, according to Duveen: “Europe had plenty of art and Americans plenty of money.” When the Titanic went down, she took 30 tons of architectural salvage with her, shipped by the London art dealer Thomas Rohan, “ancient oak I had so lovingly handled lying fathoms in the deep, a loss to humanity.”[103]
As we have seen, Ireland was prime hunting ground for dealers like Allom, a man who was adept at squirreling out gossip and shoptalk about by who might be selling and what they might have to offer. Duveen, for instance, frequently kept butlers, maids, and trades people to the aristocracy on his payroll, to make certain he heard it first if a particular family’s finances might soon force a parting of the ways with some important painting or heirloom, and Allom was the same way. His impressions of Ireland, or better put, what we know about them as they appeared in print, appear superficial to be sure. An incident that involved him in the lobby of New York’s Regis Hotel, where he had lived for several years during his travels to the United States, reveals a condescending and paternalistic attitude to be sure. Eamon de Valera had travelled to New York in 1919 as Sinn Fein’s semiofficial ambassador to the Irish-American diaspora, raising money and ramping up enthusiasm for the cause. Two sixteen year old girls (one Sheila O’Malley and her friend, Margaret Clapton), set up a table in the St. Regis lobby to solicit contributions, a presence that enraged Allom as he appeared for lunch (his passions enflamed, perhaps, by the facts that his eldest daughter had died of a bronchial infection serving as a nurse in 1918, and that during the war he had shifted from his business activity as a decorator to one of aircraft and munitions production). A loud and vocal argument ensued, Allom demanding whether the teenagers supported the Irish Rebellion, as had the kaiser and that traitor Roger Casement, their response being they supported the Irish Republic. Three porters, “who admitted Irish parentage,” then ejected Allom from the hotel, which elicited a fine stream of outrage from the esteemed gentleman. De Valera, when informed of the contre-temps, reportedly “enjoyed [himself] hugely,” and no doubt shook his head in sad resignation when Allom had a letter printed in the New York Times wondering why, in heaven’s name, the Irish people were so discontented. “Only a few weeks ago I was in Ireland and never saw such obvious signs of prosperity. Cottages, farms, and houses in excellent repair and mostly newly painted...To talk of a downtrodden people is ridiculous.” Allom blamed Roman Catholic priests for the sorry situation.[104]
How he heard about the Eyre family will probably never be known; perhaps he, or one of his agents, noted the obituary of William Henry Gregory Eyre that ran in The Irish Times on 21 February, 1925, and made further inquiries. Perhaps he noted the catalogue printed by a firm of auctioneers out of Portumna, L. Taylor & Sons, announcing an estate sale at Eyrecourt Castle scheduled for May 4, 1926.[105] Whatever the case, he was there, checkbook in hand. We know for certain the famous stairway was purchased, and also the paneling and chimney surrounds of the drawing room. Whether he bought elements from the landing of the piano nobile, and any other artifacts, is unknown, but he probably did. The stairway ensemble was dismantled, by whom no record exists, but in all likelihood workmen brought over from England, and packed into crates for shipment to London, from whence they were transferred to California to be installed at San Simeon. The drawing room, also taken apart, was reassembled in the summer of 1928 as an exhibit at a huge antiques trade show at the Olympia exhibition venue in Kensington, sponsored by London’s Daily Telegraph, Allom serving as one of the directors. The Eryecourt ensemble stood as “The Charles II Room,” and was furnished with varying examples of “Jacobean” furniture, many lent by Allom (and, of course, for sale in his firm’s booth). The Eyrecourt “room” was featured in one of Allom’s advertisements in the show catalogue, which is the last record anyone has ever seen of it.[106]
“The Charles II Room,” as advertised in the “Daily Telegraph” antiques exhibition held at London’s Olympia Center, summer 1928.
The fireplace design was taken directly from Serlio.
Maurice Craig’s photograph of a decaying Eyrecourt in the 1950s.
Today
After the removal of the great staircase, Eyrecourt was essentially abandoned. The chapel by the estate gates was left to its own devices (excepted from the estate sale of 1926, and presumably still owned by the family), the stables were utilized by local farmers to store their equipment and carts, the roof to the “castle” fell in over the years, and the walls became ivy encrusted and ruinous. The architectural historian Maurice Craig visited in the 1950s and took several photographs, one of which shows the roof in corroding condition. The only feature that looked to be in running order was Craig’s elegant automobile parked in front. The main doors were still in situ, which is surprising, but the elaborate woodworking above it had been stripped away (had Allom bought that as well? We will never know). In 1973, a visitor rummaging about the interior came upon a banister in the rubble that once had been utilized in a back stairway. To his amazement it turned out it be a superb example of the seventeenth-century woodcarving for which Eyrecourt had long been noted. The ornamental leaves and scrolling had not been carved separately and then glued to the railing, but in fact were part and parcel of the body of the wood itself, a long, single-piece instance of baroque decoration. The farmer who owned the property was indifferent to this discovery, and let the architectural scavenger have the piece as a souvenir.[107] Neighboring Eyreville, some seven miles to the west, and another once formidable estate held by the family, was deroofed in the 1960s for tax purposes, then demolished several years later. The Eyre family living there moved into a cottage on the grounds, another rather typical instance of the circumstances that so many of the Anglo-Irish gentry had been reduced.
Who to blame for these multiple falls from grace that more or less define the societal caste we commonly refer to as the Ascendancy? This is a difficult question given the interplay of myth, cliché, and popularized characterizations that have marked (or distorted, as the case may be) the Irish persona in nearly every medium, from literature to film, from political cartoons to social satire, from Somerville and Ross to Downton Abbey. It is easy to be charmed by stories of the early “fox-hunting Eyres,”[108] fun-loving, boisterous, uninhibited dare devils who held back from nothing, their joie de vivre a delightful throw back to a world, as Yeats described it in At Galway Races, “before the merchant and clerk/breathed on the world with timid breath” [109] – the very embodiment, as it were, of Wotton’s idyllic definition of a gentleman, where “everyman’s proper mansion … is the theatre of his Hospitality.”[110] This obscures, perhaps, the darker side of what Elizabeth Bowen called “decaying, brittle, vacuous Anglo-Ireland.”[111] In her novel The Last December, published in 1929, the rebels who destroyed the Big House were its “executioners.”[112] In fact, it was the Anglo-Irish themselves who contributed most to this culture’s demise. Profligate spending, too much enthusiasm for horses, dogs, card games, and alcohol, too little reflection on the societal seething from a perpetually discriminated against underclass, all made the political ramifications of land acts and encumbered estate courts merely the finger that pushed this way of life into extinction.
This is not to say that Ascendancy contributions to the art and culture of Ireland should be ignored or trivialized. Though many smaller examples of minor gentry houses in the countryside have virtually disappeared, as is the case with Eyrecourt and its cousin, Eyreville, some still remain, and many larger examples of the genre such as Castletown, Carton, and Strokestown, among others, have been saved.[113] Certainly the insouciance with which Lady Gregory’s Coole House was destroyed is an action that most sensible people today much regret, if they spend any effort thinking about it. The last time this observer passed by the ruins of Roxborough House, Lady Gregory’s birthplace, he was surprised to see a large descriptive panel with considerable information placed by the front gates. Such a sight would have been incongruous in the 1960s.
As for the Eyrecourt staircase, designed and carved by craftsmen we will never be able to identify, its fate reminds this observer of lost buried treasure that has not seen the light of day for years, or some pharaoh’s tomb awaiting an archaeologist to uncover. Hearst’s unrestrained life style came to grief the last two decades of his life. He had grown out-of-step with the new political reality of the New Deal, his influence had waned, Marion Davies’ career stalled (her movies now financial losers), and he was running out of money (comparatively speaking). In 1937, when auditors claimed that the Hearst empire was $126,000,000 in debt, he was forced to cede control of his affairs to a board of trustees who immediately, to his mortification, began selling off his beloved possessions in a series of fire sales. In 1941, the fifth floor of Gimbels Department Store in New York was entirely given over to Hearst “collectables” – swords, china, silverware, lace – and disposed of to curious crowds for almost 5c on the dollar (“Monastery for Sale,” as The New Yorker put it). In all, some 15,000 items were offered at various venues throughout New York City.[114] This broke his heart. To cap things off, Allom sued Hearst for $220,000 in unpaid invoices.[115] Orson Welles’s famous caricature of Hearst in the film Citizen Kane dwells on this last, sad phase of his life with almost pathological glee.[116]
After the removal of the great staircase, Eyrecourt was essentially abandoned. The chapel by the estate gates was left to its own devices (excepted from the estate sale of 1926, and presumably still owned by the family), the stables were utilized by local farmers to store their equipment and carts, the roof to the “castle” fell in over the years, and the walls became ivy encrusted and ruinous. The architectural historian Maurice Craig visited in the 1950s and took several photographs, one of which shows the roof in corroding condition. The only feature that looked to be in running order was Craig’s elegant automobile parked in front. The main doors were still in situ, which is surprising, but the elaborate woodworking above it had been stripped away (had Allom bought that as well? We will never know). In 1973, a visitor rummaging about the interior came upon a banister in the rubble that once had been utilized in a back stairway. To his amazement it turned out it be a superb example of the seventeenth-century woodcarving for which Eyrecourt had long been noted. The ornamental leaves and scrolling had not been carved separately and then glued to the railing, but in fact were part and parcel of the body of the wood itself, a long, single-piece instance of baroque decoration. The farmer who owned the property was indifferent to this discovery, and let the architectural scavenger have the piece as a souvenir.[107] Neighboring Eyreville, some seven miles to the west, and another once formidable estate held by the family, was deroofed in the 1960s for tax purposes, then demolished several years later. The Eyre family living there moved into a cottage on the grounds, another rather typical instance of the circumstances that so many of the Anglo-Irish gentry had been reduced.
Who to blame for these multiple falls from grace that more or less define the societal caste we commonly refer to as the Ascendancy? This is a difficult question given the interplay of myth, cliché, and popularized characterizations that have marked (or distorted, as the case may be) the Irish persona in nearly every medium, from literature to film, from political cartoons to social satire, from Somerville and Ross to Downton Abbey. It is easy to be charmed by stories of the early “fox-hunting Eyres,”[108] fun-loving, boisterous, uninhibited dare devils who held back from nothing, their joie de vivre a delightful throw back to a world, as Yeats described it in At Galway Races, “before the merchant and clerk/breathed on the world with timid breath” [109] – the very embodiment, as it were, of Wotton’s idyllic definition of a gentleman, where “everyman’s proper mansion … is the theatre of his Hospitality.”[110] This obscures, perhaps, the darker side of what Elizabeth Bowen called “decaying, brittle, vacuous Anglo-Ireland.”[111] In her novel The Last December, published in 1929, the rebels who destroyed the Big House were its “executioners.”[112] In fact, it was the Anglo-Irish themselves who contributed most to this culture’s demise. Profligate spending, too much enthusiasm for horses, dogs, card games, and alcohol, too little reflection on the societal seething from a perpetually discriminated against underclass, all made the political ramifications of land acts and encumbered estate courts merely the finger that pushed this way of life into extinction.
This is not to say that Ascendancy contributions to the art and culture of Ireland should be ignored or trivialized. Though many smaller examples of minor gentry houses in the countryside have virtually disappeared, as is the case with Eyrecourt and its cousin, Eyreville, some still remain, and many larger examples of the genre such as Castletown, Carton, and Strokestown, among others, have been saved.[113] Certainly the insouciance with which Lady Gregory’s Coole House was destroyed is an action that most sensible people today much regret, if they spend any effort thinking about it. The last time this observer passed by the ruins of Roxborough House, Lady Gregory’s birthplace, he was surprised to see a large descriptive panel with considerable information placed by the front gates. Such a sight would have been incongruous in the 1960s.
As for the Eyrecourt staircase, designed and carved by craftsmen we will never be able to identify, its fate reminds this observer of lost buried treasure that has not seen the light of day for years, or some pharaoh’s tomb awaiting an archaeologist to uncover. Hearst’s unrestrained life style came to grief the last two decades of his life. He had grown out-of-step with the new political reality of the New Deal, his influence had waned, Marion Davies’ career stalled (her movies now financial losers), and he was running out of money (comparatively speaking). In 1937, when auditors claimed that the Hearst empire was $126,000,000 in debt, he was forced to cede control of his affairs to a board of trustees who immediately, to his mortification, began selling off his beloved possessions in a series of fire sales. In 1941, the fifth floor of Gimbels Department Store in New York was entirely given over to Hearst “collectables” – swords, china, silverware, lace – and disposed of to curious crowds for almost 5c on the dollar (“Monastery for Sale,” as The New Yorker put it). In all, some 15,000 items were offered at various venues throughout New York City.[114] This broke his heart. To cap things off, Allom sued Hearst for $220,000 in unpaid invoices.[115] Orson Welles’s famous caricature of Hearst in the film Citizen Kane dwells on this last, sad phase of his life with almost pathological glee.[116]
Workmen rearranging crated panel in Detroit warehouse, 2008. Notice acanthus leaves.
Original packing tags, White & Allom.
Eyrecourt’s staircase, too unwieldy to dispose of, was never unpacked from its crates. When Hearst died in 1951, at the age of eighty-eight, most of his “white elephants” were donated to institutions and museums around the country, Eyrecourt going to the Detroit Institute of Arts, which had little idea what to do with it. Only two architectural “salvages” in his enormous collection were returned to their original sites, and their depreciation in value proved astounding. Hearst had spent in the vicinity of $40,000,000 on his treasures; another merciless audit put their value at $15,000,000. (Two items that did manage to return “home” were the ceremonial Galway mace and sword, purchased by Hearst in 1935.)[117]
The well known financial difficulties experienced by cities in the American rust belt – Detroit, Flint, Cleveland, and so on – reached a crisis for the Detroit Institute of Arts when politicians began agitating that it deaccession some of its treasures to cover shortfalls in the municipal budget (the city had declared bankruptcy, and creditors were howling). The resulting storm of controversy eased in 2014 when local benefactors, along with the state of Michigan and county municipalities, came up with close to a billion dollars, but be that as it may there remain no plans at all to utilize the stairway.[118] It is available to any suitable purchaser, provided he or it can come up with something in the vicinity of a high six-figure sum. Otherwise it will remain where it is, with its original tags bearing the emblem of White & Allom, packed up in a dreary warehouse in a dreary industrial park in Detroit, Michigan, a long ways away from the green fields of Eyrecourt, County Galway.
References & Notes
[1] Harold G. Leask, Irish Castles and Castellated Houses (Dundalk, IE: Dundalgan Press, 1964), pp. 89-90,104-105; John O’Connell, Rolf Loeber, “Eyrecourt Castle, Co. Galway,” The GPA Irish Arts Review, Yearbook (1988), p. 43.
[2] Ralph Edwards, Peter Ward-Jackson, Ham House: A Guide (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1950), pp. 23-25; P. Harbison, H. Potterton, J. Sheehy, Irish Art and Architecture from Prehistory to Present (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), pp. 118 (image 109), 130 (image 125).
[3] The Works of John Wesley, A.M. Sometime fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford ed. W. R. Ward, R. P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1988-2003), Vol.22, p. 447.
[4] It has been argued by some architectural historians that the custom originated in Venice, to spare the noble inhabitants of a palazzo the loathsome odors of the waterways, full as they were with garbage and human waste. See Georgina Masson, Italian Villas and Palaces (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966), pp. 10-11; Marion Kaminski, Venice: Art and Architecture (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1999), pp. 529, 47 (“Ca’ d’Oro”).
[5] Louis M. Cullen, The Emergence of Modern Ireland, 1600-1900 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), p. 26.
[6] Stuart Handley, “James Butler, second duke of Ormonde,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter DNB), eds. H. C. G. Matthew, B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Vol. 9, pp. 163-168.
[7] John Cronin, “‘A Gentleman of a Good Family and Fortune’: John Eyre of Eyrecourt 1640-1685,” Journal of the Galway Archaeological & Historical Society (hereafter JGAHS), Vol. 60 (2008), pp. 88-115.
[8] Another variation does not stipulate the actual feat of arms that Truelove provided for William the Conqueror at Hastings, but it must have been quick thinking and timely, as the archaic French for en eyre translates as “promptly, in haste.” Ida Gantz, Signpost to Eyrecourt: Portrait of the Eyre Family, Triumphant in the Cause of Liberty, Derbyshire, Wiltshire, Galway, c. 1415-1856 (Bath, UK: Kingsmead Press, 1974), pp. 7-10; James Fleming, “Historic Irish Mansions: No. 182, Eyrecourt Castle, Co. Galway,” Weekly Irish Times, Oct. 28, 1939; The Sporting Life, British Hunts and Huntsmen: Containing a Short History of Each Fox Hunt and Stag Hunt in the British Isles, Together With Biographical Records of Masters Past and Present, and Some Members of Each Hunt (London: The Biographical Press, 1911), Vol. III, p. 384-386.
[9] Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, Esq; Lieutenant-General of Horse, Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in Ireland, one of the Council of State, and a Member of the Parliament which began on November 3, 1640 (London: A. Millar, D. Browne, J. Ward, 1751), pp. 128-130. A musketoon is a short version of a musket, and carried as a carbine slung over the shoulder by cavalrymen.
[10] Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delaney, ed. A. Hall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Vol. I, p. 385; Works of John Wesley, op. cit., Vol. 20, p. 272.
[11] J. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant or Dormant (London: St. Catherine’s Press, 1913), Vol. II/V, p. 227; Bernard Burke, Burke’s Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Ireland (London: Burke’s Peerage, 1958), pp. 259-261; Edith Mary Johnston, Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980), pp. 134, 136 (as background, see also her Great Britain and Ireland, 1760-1800: A Study in Political Administration (Edinburgh, UK: University of St. Andrews, 1963); J. A. Froude The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1874), Vol. II, p. 70. It was Lecky who noted “the shameful jest of the politician who thanked God that he had a country to sell,” W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1892), Vol. II, p. 292; see also “Vice Royalty of Townshend,” Vol. II, pp. 79-116. Also Thomas Bartlett, “The Townshend Viceroyalty, 1767–72,” Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History, 1690–1800, ed. T. Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (Belfast, IE: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1979), pp. 88-112; J. L. McCracken, “The Irish Viceroyalty, 1760-73,” Essays in British and Irish History in Honour of James Eadie Todd, eds. H. A. Crone, T. W. Moody, D. B. Quinn (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1949), pp. 152-168.
[12] Gantz, Signpost to Eyrecourt, op. cit., p. 165.
[13] Richard Cumberland, Memoirs, Written by Himself. Containing an Account of His Life and Writings (Philadelphia, PA: Parry and Macmillan, 1856), pp. 134, 143-144. Cumberland was a well-known man of letters in London. He wrote several plays, the most successful of which was The West Indian, directed by David Garrick in 1771 at Drury Lane. He also authored poetry and several prose works of varying quality, and was a friend (or at least on speaking terms) with just about everyone in the literary scene: Dr. Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, Sheridan, among many others. His most interesting work, at least for the historian, is his Memoirs … Written by Himself, published 1801. In it he notes, “I perceive that I had fallen upon a time when great eccentricity of character was pretty nearly gone by,” which may be one reason he devoted some attention to Baron Eyre, “this noble lord” (Arthur Sherbo, “Richard Cumberland,” DNB, Vol. 14, p. 617). When in County Galway, Cumberland stayed with his parents at the so-called Bishop’s Palace, the elegant residence from c.1635 that stood within a stone’s throw of St. Brendan’s Cathedral, with its famous Irish-Romanesque doorway. This building’s last occupant was Oswald Mosley, the British fascist, who purchased the house after his release from Holloway Prison in 1943, where he had been interned for three years. Finding life in Great Britain hostile and unrewarding, he and his wife, the glamorous Diana Mitford, remained at Clonfert until fire destroyed the building in 1954. It remains a ruin. See Maurice Walsh, “Mosley in Ireland,” The Dublin Review, Vol. 26 (Spring 2007), Internet resource, unpaginated. The novelist Charles Lever also depicted East Galway in less than enthusiastic language. See Lever, Charles O’Malley, The Irish Dragoon (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, & Co., 1910), Vol. I, p. 9.
[14] Works of John Wesley, op. cit., Vol. 20, p. 447. Wesley preached at Eyrecourt several times between 1749 and 1789 and, not surprisingly, his impressions of the place varied over the years. For the most part he was disappointed in the fervor of his congregation, with one notable exception (1773) when “a great awakening has been in the town lately.” Fourteen years later, he was chagrined. “I did not find either so large or so serious a congregation in the church at Eyrecourt [as I had at Ballinasloe]. I preached between ten and eleven to a number of unconcerned hearers, and then went on to Birr.” When faced with complacency, Wesley often “spoke very plain and rough … Love will not always prevail; there is a time for the terrors of the Lord.” Wesley was, by turns, charmed and appalled by the Irish scene, the contrasts could be so extreme. On his 1775 trip, he was impressed by a salon held by Lady Moira, a well-established figure among the intelligencia of Ireland. I “was surprised to observe,” he noted in his journal, “though not a more grand, yet a far more elegant room, then any I ever saw in England.” His feelings about Waterford a few weeks later, however, were more severe, the “most foul, horrid, miserable hole which I have seen since I left” home. (Lady Moira was excoriated by Wesley in a letter of 1760 for being too much the dilettante and hostess, but her circle of friends and acquaintances could hardly be rivaled, from the world of letters [Maria Edgeworth], politics [Henry Flood], even feminism [Mary Wollstonecraft]. Intensely interested in history and archaeology, she presided over a dig on her husband’s estate in County Down of a body discovered by workmen gathering peat, the results of which were published in Archaeology (1783), the first woman to be represented in its pages. Through her husband, she helped found The Royal Irish Academy.) Works of John Wesley, op. cit., Vol. 22, p. 363; Vol. 24, pp. 18-19; Vol. 22, pp. 40, 41; Rosemary Richey, “Elizabeth Rawdon,” DNB, Vol. 46, pp. 139-140.
[15] Cumberland, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 144.
[16] Saunders’s News-letter & Irish Daily News, February 21, 1856; A Late Professional Gentleman, Recollections of Ireland: Collected from Fifty Years Practice and Residence in the Country (Windsor, UK: Privately Printed, 1865), pp. 58-59. Eyre’s annual rent roll of £20,000 may be exaggerated. Other contemporary sources put his income at half that amount. Patrick Melvin, Estates and Landed Society in Galway (Dublin: Éamonn de Búrca, 2012), p. 79 (ftn. 38).
[17] Michael George Prendergast, a “nabob” and “steady man of business,” was an off-and-on-again member of parliament from 1818 to 1831. He had made a fortune in India early in his career, and later specialized in dealing with cash-needy or bankrupt gentry in both the British Isles and abroad; as an agent for British creditors trying to settle accounts with the feckless fourth nawab of Oude, [the “granary of India”] in 1787, he was also constantly involved in suits involving the East India Company. Prendergast apparently held or purchased several notes of indebtedness from both the baron and his nephew, Giles, who had also recklessly spent thousands himself running for office. He was related by marriage to Denis Bowes Daly of Dalystown, a political kingpin in County Galway for years and called by a contemporary “a good sort of man, a popular, plentiful, racing, entertaining, electionering gentleman,” who amassed over £100,000 of debt on his various political campaigns. During the span in the wilderness when Prendergast occupied Eyrecourt, Giles evidently took up residence at Gotnamora near Ballinasloe. See Stephen Farrell, “Michael George Prendergast (d. 1834), of Ballyfair, Co. Kildare, and Eyrecourt, Co. Galway,” The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1820-1832, ed. D. R. Fisher (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Stephen Farrell, “Co. Galway,” ibid; P. J. Jupp, “Denis Bowes Daly (c. 1745-1821), of Dalystown, Co. Galway,” The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1790-1820, ed. R. Thorne (Martlesham, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 1986), all internet resources; Ambrose Leet, A Directory to the Market Towns, Villages, Gentlemen’s Seats and other Noted Places in Ireland (Dublin: Brett Smith, 1814), p. 179.
[18] Peter Somerville-Large, The Irish Country House: A Social History (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), p. 224.
[19] A Late Professional Gentleman, Recollections of Ireland, op. cit., p. 59.
[20] Cullen, Emergence of Modern Ireland, op. cit., p. 243.
[21] Kevin V. Mulligan, “The Realm of the Irish Country House,” Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690-1840, eds. W. Laffan, C. Monkhouse (Chicago, IL: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2015), p. 100.
[22] Lever, “The Man For Galway,” Charles O’Malley, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 42. Charles Lever, one of the more prolific Irish novelists of the nineteenth century, probably wrote considerably more copy than was good for his posthumous reputation, but the demands of a large family, penchant for generous hospitality, and addiction to gambling forced him to churn out works of uneven quality. Many of these offered stereotypical depictions of stage Irishmen and their many comic foibles which did little to enhance his reputation, though Thackeray, for one, admired his work (and dedicated his Irish Sketch Book to him in 1843). The opening chapters of Lever’s best novel, Charles O’Malley, offer the usual chaotic portraits of Anglo-Irish gentry, with much of the early plot taking place in East Galway. Castle O’Malley could well be Eyrecourt, for example, and Lever’s description of the hero’s father, “whose extravagance had well sustained the family reputation,” might apply to both Baron Eyre and his nephew, Giles. Lever earned the scorn of several critics, one of whom, William Carleton, the author of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, vehemently objected to his “disgusting and debasing caricatures.” Yeats conceded Lever’s “historical importance,” but found his “vivid imagination” a bit extreme. O’Malley, ibid., p. 10; Lionel Stevenson, Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever (London: Chapman & Hall, 1939), p. 141; A. Norman Jeffares, “Parnell’s Funeral and Other Poems,” A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), p. 333. See also E. S. Tilley, “Charles James Lever,” DNB, Vol. 33, pp. 518-521; W. J. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 198-199.
[23] It is interesting to note that Eyre’s obituary and funeral notice was published in the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia five months later, July 22, 1856. Younger sons from nearly every major family in County Galway are in evidence in its pages. See also Gantz, Signpost to Eyrecourt, op. cit., p. 210.
[24] Allen Stewart Hartigan, A Short Account of the Family of Eyre of Eyrecourt and Eyre of Eyreville in the County of Galway (Dublin: Privately Printed, 1898), internet resource (unpaginated) http://www.lookbackandhanker.com/eyrecourt-slaters-directory-of-ireland-1846/the-eyres-of-eyrecourt.
[25] Melvin, Estates and Landed Society, op. cit., p. 147; Gantz, Signpost to Eyrecourt, op. cit., p. 208; The Weekly News and Chronicle, July 1, 1854, p. 405.
[26] See, for examples, The Tuam Herald, July 8, 1854, The Galway Express, February 13, 1869.
[27] Landed Estates Database, NUI, www.landedestates.ie. By 1883, the Eyre estate was not large enough (less than 3000 acres) nor profitable enough (a rent roll of over £3,000 per annum) to be listed in John Bateman’s Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Harrison, 1883). By contrast, the earl of Clanricard’s holdings amounted to 56,826 acres, generating £24, 355 (p. 91).
[28] Hartigan, A Short Account of the Family of Eyre, op. cit.
[29] Ann Morrow, Picnic in a Foreign Land: The Eccentric Lives of the Anglo-Irish (London: Grafton, 1989), p. 146; “Auctions: Eyrecourt Demensne,” The Irish Times, March 22, 1926; Saunders’s News-letter & Irish Daily News, February 21, 1856; Gantz, Signpost to Eyrecourt, op. cit., p.106.
[30] Cronin, “John Eyre of Eyrecourt,” op. cit., p. 110.
[31] “Lady Ardilaun Requests the Pleasure …,” The Irish Aesthete (internet resource).
[32] One possibility, which would date the photographs to the 1920s, might be that these images were taken in preparation for the estate sale arranged by the auctioneers L. Taylor & Sons of Portumna, or by Sir Charles Allom, who became their new owner. The drawing room image was used by Allom in the catalogue of “Exhibitions of Antiques and Works of Art,” sponsored by The Daily Telegraph in London during the summer of 1928 (see ftn. 106).
[33] Adrian Tinniswood, The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939 (New York: Basic Books, 2016), p.127. For several years the Marquess of Salisbury, whose family had held Hatfield House for over three centuries, posted signs over every light switch, to facilitate their use by guests who were unaware or unused to the novelty of electricity.
[34] Terence Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland: A Study of Irish Landed Families, 1860-1960 (Dublin, IE: Wolfhound Press, 2001), pp. 107-110, 138-144.
[35] The Knight of Glin, James Peill, Irish Furniture: Woodwork and Carving in Ireland from the Earliest Times to the Act of Union (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 3.
[36] Rolf Loeber, “Irish Country Houses and Castles of the Late Caroline Period: An Unremembered Past Recaptured,” Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, Vol. XVI, Nos. 1 & 2 (January-June 1973), pp. 33, 63 (ftn. 277).
[37] Margaret Whinney, Oliver Millar, English Art 1625-1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 47.
[38] Ibid., p. 49.
[39] David Esterly, Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), p. 11. Gibbons is the premier wood carver in all of British history. Born in Rotterdam of English parents, his “discovery” by the horticulturalist and voluminous letter writer/diarist John Evelyn who, on a walk outside of Deptford, saw Gibbons work in a “poor thatched cottage in a field,” is but one of many legends associated with him. At the height of his career he worked at Hampton Court, Whitehall Palace, St. Paul’s Cathedral (where his choir earned him £2992), and several country houses (at Blenheim, he charged £4,000 for work performed). Gibbons also secured royal commissions in statuary (he did figures of both Charles II and James II, in Roman attire) and funerary monuments. Many of the workmen who served him as apprentices were from Flanders. See also David Esterly, “Grinling Gibbons,” DNB, Vol. 22, pp. 25-32.
[40] Loeber, “Irish Country Houses,” op. cit., p. 35.
[41] The career of May, a patron of Gibbons, has, like Pratt, only recently been studied with keen interest; both men were overshadowed by Wren.
[42] Geoffrey Beard, Georgian Craftsmen and their Work (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1966), p. 15.
[43] John Bold, “Sir Roger Pratt,” DNB, Vol. 45, pp. 226-227. One of Pratt’s better known designs was Coleshill House in Berkshire. The staircase there, like Eyrecourt, was marked by “wreathing acanthus in foliated panels.” Coleshill was destroyed by fire in 1952, and its remaining walls pulled down six years later. Beard, Craftsmen, op. cit., p. xx. See also Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 827-829.
[44] Jane Fenton, “Episodes of Magnificence: The Material Worlds of the Dukes of Ormonde,” The Dukes of Ormonde, 1610-1745, ed. T. Barnard, J. Fenlon (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2000), p. 151. Ormond was generally up-to-date on current artistic trends in England. He often wrote friends there for advice. Ormonde’s major construction project, the
aforementioned Royal Hospital, was clearly the highlight of his contribution to Dublin’s infrastructure, otherwise known best for its “meager architectural inventory.” Knight of Glin, Peill, Irish Furniture, op. cit., p. 35.
[45] Charles Tracy, Continental Church Furniture in England: Traffic in Piety (Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2001), p. 34. The full title of Serlio’s masterwork is l sette libri dell’architettura, or The Seven Books of Architecture.
[46] Sebastiano Serlio, On Architecture, trans. V. Hart, P. Hicks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), Vol. 2, pp. 234-235 (Plate B); O’Connell, Loeber, “Eyrecourt Castle,” op. cit., p. 47; Rolf Loeber, “Early Classicism in Ireland: Architecture Before the Georgian Era,” Architectural History, Vol. 22 (1979), pp. 53, 57.
[47] Sir Henry Wotton, who survived his association as a secretary to the ill-fated Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, enjoyed a long career as diplomat and advisor to both Elizabeth I and James I. Widely travelled, he was an avid connoisseur of art and architecture, multilingual in several languages, and an inveterate letter write (over 500 survive).
[48] Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 157.
[49] O’Connell, Loeber, “Eyrecourt Castle,” op. cit., pp. 47, 48 (ftn. 20); Knight of Glin, Peill, Irish Furniture, op. cit., p. 28.
[50] Geoffrey Beard, Craftsmen and Interior Decoration in England, 1660-1820 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), pp. xix, 29; Grace Lawless Lee, The Huguenot Settlements in Ireland (London: Longman, Green, 1936), p. 12.
[51] Mulligan, “Realm of the Irish Country House,” op. cit., p. 97.
[52] Geoffrey Beard, The Work of Christopher Wren (Edinburgh, UK: John Bartholomew & Son, 1982), p. 20; Paul Jeffrey, The City Churches of Christopher Wren (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), p. XVII.
[53] G. Beard, C. A. Knott, “Edward Pearce’s Work at Sudbury,” Apollo (April 2000), pp. 43-48; Beard, Craftsmen, op. cit., p. 68. See also Katherine Eustace, “Edward Pearce,” DNB. Vol. 43, pp. 277-279.
[54] Homan Potterton, “A New Pupil of Edward Pierce: William Kidwell,” Burlington Magazine, Vol. 114, No. 837 (December 1972), pp. 864-867.
[55] O’Connell, Loeber, “Eyrecourt Castle,” op. cit., p. 40.
[56] Eileen Gormanston, A Little Kept (London: Sheed and Ward, 1953), pp. 75-76.
[57] Dooley, Decline of the Big House in Ireland, op. cit., pp. 286-287 (Tables 7.1, 7.4); there is a five-month gap in these tables from August through December, 1921.
[58] Melvin, Estates and Landed Society, op. cit., pp. xix, 121, 94, 121, 72, 81, 111.
[59] Terrence Dooley, The Rise and Fall of the Dukes of Leinster, 1872-1948: Love, War, Debt and Madness (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), pp. 127-128; Dooley, Decline of the Big House in Ireland, op. cit., pp. 91, 113-114.
[60] Melvin, Estates and Landed Society, op. cit., p. 152.
[61] Ibid., p. 140; Dooley, The Rise and Fall of the Dukes of Leinster, op. cit., pp. 207-208; Roy Strong, Marcus Binney, John Harris, et al, The Destruction of the Country House, 1875-1975 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 107. Lady Chapman had long been estranged from her husband, the seventh baronet, who deserted her in favor of the family’s governess, with whom he sired five children, the second of whom, Thomas Edward Lawrence, is better known today as Lawrence of Arabia. Samson is now in the collection of the Gemälde Gallery, State Museum of Berlin. For the financial meltdown of that other great Irish family, the Ormonds, see Dooley, ibid, p. 138; Mark Bence-Jones, Twilight of the Ascendancy (London: Constable, 1987), pp. 263, 302-304. See also Mark Bence-Jones, “The Changing Picture of the Irish Landed Gentry,” Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland, op. cit, pp. XVII-XXI.
[62] Cumberland, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 144. To be fair, the turn-of-the-century photograph of the drawing room reproduced in this article does show a small bookcase to the right of the fireplace, the volumes in which appear to be leather-bound.
[63] For the Vanderbilt marriage see Wayne Craven, “European Aristocracy and American Parvenus,” Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009), pp. 25-31.
[64] Dooley, Decline of the Big House in Ireland, op. cit., p. 89.
[65] Knight of Glin, Peill, Irish Furniture, op. cit., p. 31.
[66] Lever, Charles O’Malley, op. cit., p. 7.
[67] Ben Procter, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863-1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 19.
[68] Ibid., pp. 17, 165, 44.
[69] When Joseph Pulitzer attempted to establish and fund a school of journalism at Columbia University in 1892, its then president refused to consider it. James McGrath Morris, Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), pp. 376-379.
[70] Donald J. Hagerty, “Meeting Mr. Hearst’s Headlines: The Newspaper and Magazine Illustrations of Maynard Dixon,” California State Library Foundation Bulletin, No. 86 (2007), p. 6.
[71] Ben Procter: William Randolph Hearst: Final Edition, 1911-1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 6.
[72] Procter, Hearst, Early Years, op. cit., p. 193; Procter, Hearst, Final Edition, op. cit., p. 121.
[73] Marion Davies, The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst, eds. P. Pfau, K. S. Marx (New York: Ballantine, 1975), p. 57.
[74] Procter, Hearst: Final Edition, op. cit., pp. 94, 112; Procter, Hearst: Early Years, op. cit., p. 70.
[75] Anne Edwards, “Marion Davies’ Ocean House: The Santa Monica Palace Ruled by Hearst’s Mistress,” Architectural Digest, April 1994, pp. 170-175, cont. 277; John Harris, Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 221; Procter, Hearst: Final Edition, ibid., p. 130.
[76] Another tycoon of the times was a guest, Joseph P. Kennedy, also enamored with a Hollywood film star who accompanied him, Gloria Swanson.
[77] Nancy Rubin, John Hays Hammond, Jr. A Renaissance Man in the Twentieth Century (Gloucester, MA: Hammond Museum, 1987), p. 17.
[78] James Charles Roy, “Letters to and From County Galway Emigrants 1843-1856,” JGAHS, Vol. 56 (2004), p. 152 (ftn. 117).
[79] Procter, Hearst, Final Edition, op. cit., p. 203.
[80] Howard M. Colvin, “Recycling the Monasteries: Demolition and Reuse by the Tudor Government, 1537-47,” Essays in English Architectural History (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 52-66; John Harris, Echoing Voices: More Memories of a Country House Snoop (London: John Murray, 2002), p. 52.
[81] L. F. Salzman, ed., A History of the County of Sussex: Vol. 7, The Rape of Lewes, (London: Victorian County History, 1940), pp. 181-186; Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., p. 14; Malcolm Airs, “John Thorpe,” DNB, Vol. 54, pp. 668-669.
[82] Giles Worsley, England’s Lost Houses: from the Archives of “Country Life” (London: Aurum Press, 2002), p. 7.
[83] See S. Marsden, D. McLaren, In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), pp. 22-23, 82-83; Mark Bence-Jones, Burke’s Guide to Country Houses, Volume I, Ireland (London: Burke’s Peerage, 1978) pp. 110-112.
[84] John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 125.
[85] Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., pp. 222, 306 (ftn. 24).
[86] Ibid., pp. 56, 209.
[87] Ibid., p. 152.
[88] Robert Smith, “Critic’s Notebook: Rooms with a View of History,” New York Times, January 14, 2000.
[89] Tinniswood, The Long Weekend, op. cit., p. 23; Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., p. 111.
[90] Harris, ibid., pp. 112-113.
[91] Ibid., pp. 252-256.
[92] Tinniswood, The Long Weekend, op. cit., pp. 41-42.
[93] Craven, “European Aristocracy and American Parvenus,” op. cit., p. 9.
[94] Tinniswood, The Long Weekend, op. cit., p. 133.
[95] “Statue of Christ Embroils Epstein,” New York Times, October 23, 1937, p. 19. “Consummatum Est” (“It is finished”) were Christ’s last words, according to St. John’s Gospel. Epstein’s response was succinct: “I shall take no notice of what others think.” The piece is in the collection of National Gallery Scotland.
[96] “Fragonards Moved to New Frick Home: Paintings to be Set in Drawing Room Designed for them by Sir Charles Allom,” New York Times, March 16, 1915, p. 10; Harris, Echoing Voices, op. cit., p. 111.
[97] Allom sold this house ten years later for $650,000. “Madison Av. Sale Closed by Cable,” New York Times, January 28, 1930, p. 45.
[98] Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., p. 301 (ftn. 240).
[99] “Houses of Augustinian Canons: Priory of Badenstoke,” A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 3, eds. R. B. Pugh, E. Crittal (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), internet resource.
[100] Enfys McMurray, Hearst’s Other Castle (Bridgend, WAL: Seren, 1999), p. 39.
[101] Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., p. xv.
[102] “England’s Masterpieces,” New York Times, March 26, 1912, p. 12; “‘The Blue Boy’ Sold: Coming to America,” New York Times, October 18, 1921, pp. 1, 11; James E. Thorpe, Henry Edwards Huntington: A Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 438. Huntington was also an avid book collector; he established in his will the famous Huntington Library, which opened a year after his death in 1927. The duke of Westminster sold his London mansion, Grosvenor House, three years later for £370,000.
[103] Thomas Rohan, Confessions of a Dealer (London: Mills & Boon Ltd., 1924), p. 90; Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., pp. vii, 10.
[104] “Sinn Fein Storm Sweeps St. Regis,” New York Times, June 26, 1919, pp. 1, 3, 26; June 27, 1919, p. 8; July 14, 1919, p. 10.
[105] The “vendor” of the properties was Eyre’s wife, née Louisa Butler. Excepted from the sale was the “entire internal fabric of Eyrecourt Castle or any part thereof (including the front Hall Door and Doorway, to be removable by the vendor,”) i.e. the architectural elements purchased by Allom. For the legal notice, see ftn. 29. Also excepted was the church and graveyard by the main gate, currently overgrown. Special mention was made in the auction catalogue for one William Bell, evidently an old family retainer, who lived in the Mall Gate Lodge leading into the village, for which he paid a weekly rent of sixpence. One other servant was also provided for, in a fashion: Michael Higgins, in exchange for a weekly salary of twelve shillings and sixpence, was to be allowed to live in another of the estate’s gate cottages (with its garden, rent free), plus the right to graze a cow and a calf on the demesne’s lawn, in return for which he would provide “light duties as a labourer on the property.” Auction catalogue courtesy of Michael Clarke, Eyrecourt.
[106] “Catalogue of Exhibits,” The Daily Telegraph Exhibition of Antiques and Works of Art, Olympia, July 19-August 1, 1928, pp. 37, 49, 136, 195-198, 261-262.
[107] O’Connell, Loeber, “Eyrecourt Castle,” op. cit., p. 47. Other comments on the ruinous state of Eyrecourt and Eyreville include: The Knight of Glin, D. K. Griffin, N. K. Robinson, Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland (Dublin: The Irish Architectural Archive, The Irish Georgian Society, 1988), pp. 71-72; Maurice Craig, The Architecture of Ireland: From the Earliest Times to 1880 (1992), pp. 141, 144.
[108] Melvin, Estates and Landed Society, op. cit., p. 121.
[109] William Butler Yeats, “At Galway Races,” The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 95.
[110] A. J. Loomie, “Sir Henry Wotton,” DNB, Vol. 60, p. 381.
[111] Dorothea Cole, “Elizabeth Bowen,” Dictionary of Irish Biography, eds. J. McGuire, J. Quinn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Vol. I, p. 693.
[112] Elizabeth Bowen, The Last December (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), p. 303.
[113] Houses similar to Eyrecourt in Ireland include Beaulieu House, Co. Louth (still extant) and Burton House, County Cork (burnt in 1690). Bence-Jones, Burke’s Guide to Country Houses, op. cit., pp. 122, 34, 50; Harbison, Potterton, Sheehy, Irish Art and Architecture, op. cit., p. 123.
[114] A. J. Liebling, “The Man Who Changed the Rules,” Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary “New Yorker” Writer (New York: North Point Press, 2004), p. 442; Procter, Hearst: Final Edition, op. cit., pp. 225-226; “Onward and Upward with the Arts: Monastery for Sale,” The New Yorker, February 1, 1941, p. 33.
[115] Unsuccessfully, it would appear. Other sources say the sum in question was £409,000. See Tinniswood, The Long Weekend, op. cit., p. 134; McMurray, Hearst’s Other Castle, op. cit., p. 40.
[116] Welles denied that Citizen Kane, one of the most influential movies ever made, had anything to do with Hearst. “In Kane, everything was invented,” he wrote, a transparent falsehood. Davies, The Times We Had, op. cit., Forward (unpaginated).
[117] Ceremonial swords and maces, symbols of civic authority, are commonplace artifacts in many towns and corporations throughout the British Isles. The origins of the Galway sword are somewhat obscure, but the blade appears to be of sixteenth-century origin and from Germany; it was a “working” sword, not meant for ornament. The hilt and pommel, however, are more elaborate ceremonial additions, and bear the marks of two known Galway City silversmiths. The mace, made in Dublin, was commissioned by Edward Eyre, mayor of the city from 1710-1712, and donated by him to the town. He was the son of Col. Eyre’s brother and companion in arms, referenced earlier in this narrative, and also named Edward. Both these artifacts ended up in the possession of the Blake family in the 1840s, allegedly as some sort of back payment for monies spent by a member of that family who happened to be mayor at the time. Hard pressed for money, a Miss Blake put these pieces on auction at Christie’s in London, 1935, where Hearst purchased them for £5,000, sending them first to St. Donat’s in Wales, then to San Simeon in 1938. Like the long-lost town seal of neighboring Athenry, it was finally returned to Galway City in 1960 by his widow and the Hearst Foundation. See “Sword and Mace Back to Galway,” The Irish Times, August 29, 1960; G. A. Hayes McCoy, “The Galway Mace and Sword,” JGAHS, Vol. 29 (1960-1961), pp. 15-36.
[118] The Detroit Institute of Arts, founded in 1885, houses one of the most important collections of art in the United States (it was the first museum in the country to buy a van Gough, 1922), but has always been on uncertain financial footing. In 1919, facing a critical shortfall in funds, it became a city department, with funding supplied from the municipal tax base, a satisfactory solution at the time as Detroit was booming. No so at the turn of the twentieth-first century, when the city declared bankruptcy, and the temporary manager began describing DIA’s collection as a potential “asset” that could help save the employee pension fund. In November of 2014, a “Grand Bargain” was reached (along with a billion dollars), that removed DIA from city ownership and made it a private charitable trust responsible for its own budgets. See Randy Kennedy, New York Times: “Detroit Institute of Arts Copes With Threat of Art Selloff” (October 2, 2013); “Fate of Detroit’s Art Hangs in the Balance” (December 3, 2013); “Detroit’s Art May Be Worth Billions, Report says” (July 9, 2014); “ ‘Grand Bargain’ Saves the Detroit Institute of Arts” (November 14, 2014); Larissa MacFarquhar, “What Money Can Buy,” The New Yorker, January 4, 2016, pp. 45-46.
Photo Credits: The three staircase images, courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts; the East Galway Hunt, courtesy of George Gossip; two photographs of Eyrecourt in the 1950s by Maurice Craig, courtesy of the Irish Architectural Archive; Hearst dinner party, © Hearst Castle®/CA State Parks; period room awaiting assembly, courtesy North Carolina Museum of Art.
Acknowledgements: Angela Bell-Morris, NCMA; Michael Clarke; John Cronin; Christy Cunniffe; Alan P. Darr, DIA; Aisling Dunne, IAA; Vickie Garagliano, CA State Parks; George Gossip; Alix Cochran Hackett; Renee Massarello, DIA; James Pethica, Williams College; Dana Blennerhassett Roy; Lynda Scheidecker, The William Randolph Hearst Foundations.
The well known financial difficulties experienced by cities in the American rust belt – Detroit, Flint, Cleveland, and so on – reached a crisis for the Detroit Institute of Arts when politicians began agitating that it deaccession some of its treasures to cover shortfalls in the municipal budget (the city had declared bankruptcy, and creditors were howling). The resulting storm of controversy eased in 2014 when local benefactors, along with the state of Michigan and county municipalities, came up with close to a billion dollars, but be that as it may there remain no plans at all to utilize the stairway.[118] It is available to any suitable purchaser, provided he or it can come up with something in the vicinity of a high six-figure sum. Otherwise it will remain where it is, with its original tags bearing the emblem of White & Allom, packed up in a dreary warehouse in a dreary industrial park in Detroit, Michigan, a long ways away from the green fields of Eyrecourt, County Galway.
References & Notes
[1] Harold G. Leask, Irish Castles and Castellated Houses (Dundalk, IE: Dundalgan Press, 1964), pp. 89-90,104-105; John O’Connell, Rolf Loeber, “Eyrecourt Castle, Co. Galway,” The GPA Irish Arts Review, Yearbook (1988), p. 43.
[2] Ralph Edwards, Peter Ward-Jackson, Ham House: A Guide (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1950), pp. 23-25; P. Harbison, H. Potterton, J. Sheehy, Irish Art and Architecture from Prehistory to Present (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), pp. 118 (image 109), 130 (image 125).
[3] The Works of John Wesley, A.M. Sometime fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford ed. W. R. Ward, R. P. Heitzenrater (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1988-2003), Vol.22, p. 447.
[4] It has been argued by some architectural historians that the custom originated in Venice, to spare the noble inhabitants of a palazzo the loathsome odors of the waterways, full as they were with garbage and human waste. See Georgina Masson, Italian Villas and Palaces (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966), pp. 10-11; Marion Kaminski, Venice: Art and Architecture (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1999), pp. 529, 47 (“Ca’ d’Oro”).
[5] Louis M. Cullen, The Emergence of Modern Ireland, 1600-1900 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), p. 26.
[6] Stuart Handley, “James Butler, second duke of Ormonde,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter DNB), eds. H. C. G. Matthew, B. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Vol. 9, pp. 163-168.
[7] John Cronin, “‘A Gentleman of a Good Family and Fortune’: John Eyre of Eyrecourt 1640-1685,” Journal of the Galway Archaeological & Historical Society (hereafter JGAHS), Vol. 60 (2008), pp. 88-115.
[8] Another variation does not stipulate the actual feat of arms that Truelove provided for William the Conqueror at Hastings, but it must have been quick thinking and timely, as the archaic French for en eyre translates as “promptly, in haste.” Ida Gantz, Signpost to Eyrecourt: Portrait of the Eyre Family, Triumphant in the Cause of Liberty, Derbyshire, Wiltshire, Galway, c. 1415-1856 (Bath, UK: Kingsmead Press, 1974), pp. 7-10; James Fleming, “Historic Irish Mansions: No. 182, Eyrecourt Castle, Co. Galway,” Weekly Irish Times, Oct. 28, 1939; The Sporting Life, British Hunts and Huntsmen: Containing a Short History of Each Fox Hunt and Stag Hunt in the British Isles, Together With Biographical Records of Masters Past and Present, and Some Members of Each Hunt (London: The Biographical Press, 1911), Vol. III, p. 384-386.
[9] Edmund Ludlow, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, Esq; Lieutenant-General of Horse, Commander-in-Chief of the Forces in Ireland, one of the Council of State, and a Member of the Parliament which began on November 3, 1640 (London: A. Millar, D. Browne, J. Ward, 1751), pp. 128-130. A musketoon is a short version of a musket, and carried as a carbine slung over the shoulder by cavalrymen.
[10] Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delaney, ed. A. Hall (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Vol. I, p. 385; Works of John Wesley, op. cit., Vol. 20, p. 272.
[11] J. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant or Dormant (London: St. Catherine’s Press, 1913), Vol. II/V, p. 227; Bernard Burke, Burke’s Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry of Ireland (London: Burke’s Peerage, 1958), pp. 259-261; Edith Mary Johnston, Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980), pp. 134, 136 (as background, see also her Great Britain and Ireland, 1760-1800: A Study in Political Administration (Edinburgh, UK: University of St. Andrews, 1963); J. A. Froude The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1874), Vol. II, p. 70. It was Lecky who noted “the shameful jest of the politician who thanked God that he had a country to sell,” W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1892), Vol. II, p. 292; see also “Vice Royalty of Townshend,” Vol. II, pp. 79-116. Also Thomas Bartlett, “The Townshend Viceroyalty, 1767–72,” Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History, 1690–1800, ed. T. Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (Belfast, IE: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1979), pp. 88-112; J. L. McCracken, “The Irish Viceroyalty, 1760-73,” Essays in British and Irish History in Honour of James Eadie Todd, eds. H. A. Crone, T. W. Moody, D. B. Quinn (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1949), pp. 152-168.
[12] Gantz, Signpost to Eyrecourt, op. cit., p. 165.
[13] Richard Cumberland, Memoirs, Written by Himself. Containing an Account of His Life and Writings (Philadelphia, PA: Parry and Macmillan, 1856), pp. 134, 143-144. Cumberland was a well-known man of letters in London. He wrote several plays, the most successful of which was The West Indian, directed by David Garrick in 1771 at Drury Lane. He also authored poetry and several prose works of varying quality, and was a friend (or at least on speaking terms) with just about everyone in the literary scene: Dr. Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, Sheridan, among many others. His most interesting work, at least for the historian, is his Memoirs … Written by Himself, published 1801. In it he notes, “I perceive that I had fallen upon a time when great eccentricity of character was pretty nearly gone by,” which may be one reason he devoted some attention to Baron Eyre, “this noble lord” (Arthur Sherbo, “Richard Cumberland,” DNB, Vol. 14, p. 617). When in County Galway, Cumberland stayed with his parents at the so-called Bishop’s Palace, the elegant residence from c.1635 that stood within a stone’s throw of St. Brendan’s Cathedral, with its famous Irish-Romanesque doorway. This building’s last occupant was Oswald Mosley, the British fascist, who purchased the house after his release from Holloway Prison in 1943, where he had been interned for three years. Finding life in Great Britain hostile and unrewarding, he and his wife, the glamorous Diana Mitford, remained at Clonfert until fire destroyed the building in 1954. It remains a ruin. See Maurice Walsh, “Mosley in Ireland,” The Dublin Review, Vol. 26 (Spring 2007), Internet resource, unpaginated. The novelist Charles Lever also depicted East Galway in less than enthusiastic language. See Lever, Charles O’Malley, The Irish Dragoon (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, & Co., 1910), Vol. I, p. 9.
[14] Works of John Wesley, op. cit., Vol. 20, p. 447. Wesley preached at Eyrecourt several times between 1749 and 1789 and, not surprisingly, his impressions of the place varied over the years. For the most part he was disappointed in the fervor of his congregation, with one notable exception (1773) when “a great awakening has been in the town lately.” Fourteen years later, he was chagrined. “I did not find either so large or so serious a congregation in the church at Eyrecourt [as I had at Ballinasloe]. I preached between ten and eleven to a number of unconcerned hearers, and then went on to Birr.” When faced with complacency, Wesley often “spoke very plain and rough … Love will not always prevail; there is a time for the terrors of the Lord.” Wesley was, by turns, charmed and appalled by the Irish scene, the contrasts could be so extreme. On his 1775 trip, he was impressed by a salon held by Lady Moira, a well-established figure among the intelligencia of Ireland. I “was surprised to observe,” he noted in his journal, “though not a more grand, yet a far more elegant room, then any I ever saw in England.” His feelings about Waterford a few weeks later, however, were more severe, the “most foul, horrid, miserable hole which I have seen since I left” home. (Lady Moira was excoriated by Wesley in a letter of 1760 for being too much the dilettante and hostess, but her circle of friends and acquaintances could hardly be rivaled, from the world of letters [Maria Edgeworth], politics [Henry Flood], even feminism [Mary Wollstonecraft]. Intensely interested in history and archaeology, she presided over a dig on her husband’s estate in County Down of a body discovered by workmen gathering peat, the results of which were published in Archaeology (1783), the first woman to be represented in its pages. Through her husband, she helped found The Royal Irish Academy.) Works of John Wesley, op. cit., Vol. 22, p. 363; Vol. 24, pp. 18-19; Vol. 22, pp. 40, 41; Rosemary Richey, “Elizabeth Rawdon,” DNB, Vol. 46, pp. 139-140.
[15] Cumberland, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 144.
[16] Saunders’s News-letter & Irish Daily News, February 21, 1856; A Late Professional Gentleman, Recollections of Ireland: Collected from Fifty Years Practice and Residence in the Country (Windsor, UK: Privately Printed, 1865), pp. 58-59. Eyre’s annual rent roll of £20,000 may be exaggerated. Other contemporary sources put his income at half that amount. Patrick Melvin, Estates and Landed Society in Galway (Dublin: Éamonn de Búrca, 2012), p. 79 (ftn. 38).
[17] Michael George Prendergast, a “nabob” and “steady man of business,” was an off-and-on-again member of parliament from 1818 to 1831. He had made a fortune in India early in his career, and later specialized in dealing with cash-needy or bankrupt gentry in both the British Isles and abroad; as an agent for British creditors trying to settle accounts with the feckless fourth nawab of Oude, [the “granary of India”] in 1787, he was also constantly involved in suits involving the East India Company. Prendergast apparently held or purchased several notes of indebtedness from both the baron and his nephew, Giles, who had also recklessly spent thousands himself running for office. He was related by marriage to Denis Bowes Daly of Dalystown, a political kingpin in County Galway for years and called by a contemporary “a good sort of man, a popular, plentiful, racing, entertaining, electionering gentleman,” who amassed over £100,000 of debt on his various political campaigns. During the span in the wilderness when Prendergast occupied Eyrecourt, Giles evidently took up residence at Gotnamora near Ballinasloe. See Stephen Farrell, “Michael George Prendergast (d. 1834), of Ballyfair, Co. Kildare, and Eyrecourt, Co. Galway,” The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1820-1832, ed. D. R. Fisher (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Stephen Farrell, “Co. Galway,” ibid; P. J. Jupp, “Denis Bowes Daly (c. 1745-1821), of Dalystown, Co. Galway,” The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1790-1820, ed. R. Thorne (Martlesham, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 1986), all internet resources; Ambrose Leet, A Directory to the Market Towns, Villages, Gentlemen’s Seats and other Noted Places in Ireland (Dublin: Brett Smith, 1814), p. 179.
[18] Peter Somerville-Large, The Irish Country House: A Social History (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), p. 224.
[19] A Late Professional Gentleman, Recollections of Ireland, op. cit., p. 59.
[20] Cullen, Emergence of Modern Ireland, op. cit., p. 243.
[21] Kevin V. Mulligan, “The Realm of the Irish Country House,” Ireland: Crossroads of Art and Design, 1690-1840, eds. W. Laffan, C. Monkhouse (Chicago, IL: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2015), p. 100.
[22] Lever, “The Man For Galway,” Charles O’Malley, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 42. Charles Lever, one of the more prolific Irish novelists of the nineteenth century, probably wrote considerably more copy than was good for his posthumous reputation, but the demands of a large family, penchant for generous hospitality, and addiction to gambling forced him to churn out works of uneven quality. Many of these offered stereotypical depictions of stage Irishmen and their many comic foibles which did little to enhance his reputation, though Thackeray, for one, admired his work (and dedicated his Irish Sketch Book to him in 1843). The opening chapters of Lever’s best novel, Charles O’Malley, offer the usual chaotic portraits of Anglo-Irish gentry, with much of the early plot taking place in East Galway. Castle O’Malley could well be Eyrecourt, for example, and Lever’s description of the hero’s father, “whose extravagance had well sustained the family reputation,” might apply to both Baron Eyre and his nephew, Giles. Lever earned the scorn of several critics, one of whom, William Carleton, the author of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, vehemently objected to his “disgusting and debasing caricatures.” Yeats conceded Lever’s “historical importance,” but found his “vivid imagination” a bit extreme. O’Malley, ibid., p. 10; Lionel Stevenson, Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever (London: Chapman & Hall, 1939), p. 141; A. Norman Jeffares, “Parnell’s Funeral and Other Poems,” A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984), p. 333. See also E. S. Tilley, “Charles James Lever,” DNB, Vol. 33, pp. 518-521; W. J. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 198-199.
[23] It is interesting to note that Eyre’s obituary and funeral notice was published in the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia five months later, July 22, 1856. Younger sons from nearly every major family in County Galway are in evidence in its pages. See also Gantz, Signpost to Eyrecourt, op. cit., p. 210.
[24] Allen Stewart Hartigan, A Short Account of the Family of Eyre of Eyrecourt and Eyre of Eyreville in the County of Galway (Dublin: Privately Printed, 1898), internet resource (unpaginated) http://www.lookbackandhanker.com/eyrecourt-slaters-directory-of-ireland-1846/the-eyres-of-eyrecourt.
[25] Melvin, Estates and Landed Society, op. cit., p. 147; Gantz, Signpost to Eyrecourt, op. cit., p. 208; The Weekly News and Chronicle, July 1, 1854, p. 405.
[26] See, for examples, The Tuam Herald, July 8, 1854, The Galway Express, February 13, 1869.
[27] Landed Estates Database, NUI, www.landedestates.ie. By 1883, the Eyre estate was not large enough (less than 3000 acres) nor profitable enough (a rent roll of over £3,000 per annum) to be listed in John Bateman’s Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Harrison, 1883). By contrast, the earl of Clanricard’s holdings amounted to 56,826 acres, generating £24, 355 (p. 91).
[28] Hartigan, A Short Account of the Family of Eyre, op. cit.
[29] Ann Morrow, Picnic in a Foreign Land: The Eccentric Lives of the Anglo-Irish (London: Grafton, 1989), p. 146; “Auctions: Eyrecourt Demensne,” The Irish Times, March 22, 1926; Saunders’s News-letter & Irish Daily News, February 21, 1856; Gantz, Signpost to Eyrecourt, op. cit., p.106.
[30] Cronin, “John Eyre of Eyrecourt,” op. cit., p. 110.
[31] “Lady Ardilaun Requests the Pleasure …,” The Irish Aesthete (internet resource).
[32] One possibility, which would date the photographs to the 1920s, might be that these images were taken in preparation for the estate sale arranged by the auctioneers L. Taylor & Sons of Portumna, or by Sir Charles Allom, who became their new owner. The drawing room image was used by Allom in the catalogue of “Exhibitions of Antiques and Works of Art,” sponsored by The Daily Telegraph in London during the summer of 1928 (see ftn. 106).
[33] Adrian Tinniswood, The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939 (New York: Basic Books, 2016), p.127. For several years the Marquess of Salisbury, whose family had held Hatfield House for over three centuries, posted signs over every light switch, to facilitate their use by guests who were unaware or unused to the novelty of electricity.
[34] Terence Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland: A Study of Irish Landed Families, 1860-1960 (Dublin, IE: Wolfhound Press, 2001), pp. 107-110, 138-144.
[35] The Knight of Glin, James Peill, Irish Furniture: Woodwork and Carving in Ireland from the Earliest Times to the Act of Union (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 3.
[36] Rolf Loeber, “Irish Country Houses and Castles of the Late Caroline Period: An Unremembered Past Recaptured,” Bulletin of the Irish Georgian Society, Vol. XVI, Nos. 1 & 2 (January-June 1973), pp. 33, 63 (ftn. 277).
[37] Margaret Whinney, Oliver Millar, English Art 1625-1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 47.
[38] Ibid., p. 49.
[39] David Esterly, Grinling Gibbons and the Art of Carving (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), p. 11. Gibbons is the premier wood carver in all of British history. Born in Rotterdam of English parents, his “discovery” by the horticulturalist and voluminous letter writer/diarist John Evelyn who, on a walk outside of Deptford, saw Gibbons work in a “poor thatched cottage in a field,” is but one of many legends associated with him. At the height of his career he worked at Hampton Court, Whitehall Palace, St. Paul’s Cathedral (where his choir earned him £2992), and several country houses (at Blenheim, he charged £4,000 for work performed). Gibbons also secured royal commissions in statuary (he did figures of both Charles II and James II, in Roman attire) and funerary monuments. Many of the workmen who served him as apprentices were from Flanders. See also David Esterly, “Grinling Gibbons,” DNB, Vol. 22, pp. 25-32.
[40] Loeber, “Irish Country Houses,” op. cit., p. 35.
[41] The career of May, a patron of Gibbons, has, like Pratt, only recently been studied with keen interest; both men were overshadowed by Wren.
[42] Geoffrey Beard, Georgian Craftsmen and their Work (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1966), p. 15.
[43] John Bold, “Sir Roger Pratt,” DNB, Vol. 45, pp. 226-227. One of Pratt’s better known designs was Coleshill House in Berkshire. The staircase there, like Eyrecourt, was marked by “wreathing acanthus in foliated panels.” Coleshill was destroyed by fire in 1952, and its remaining walls pulled down six years later. Beard, Craftsmen, op. cit., p. xx. See also Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 827-829.
[44] Jane Fenton, “Episodes of Magnificence: The Material Worlds of the Dukes of Ormonde,” The Dukes of Ormonde, 1610-1745, ed. T. Barnard, J. Fenlon (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2000), p. 151. Ormond was generally up-to-date on current artistic trends in England. He often wrote friends there for advice. Ormonde’s major construction project, the
aforementioned Royal Hospital, was clearly the highlight of his contribution to Dublin’s infrastructure, otherwise known best for its “meager architectural inventory.” Knight of Glin, Peill, Irish Furniture, op. cit., p. 35.
[45] Charles Tracy, Continental Church Furniture in England: Traffic in Piety (Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2001), p. 34. The full title of Serlio’s masterwork is l sette libri dell’architettura, or The Seven Books of Architecture.
[46] Sebastiano Serlio, On Architecture, trans. V. Hart, P. Hicks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), Vol. 2, pp. 234-235 (Plate B); O’Connell, Loeber, “Eyrecourt Castle,” op. cit., p. 47; Rolf Loeber, “Early Classicism in Ireland: Architecture Before the Georgian Era,” Architectural History, Vol. 22 (1979), pp. 53, 57.
[47] Sir Henry Wotton, who survived his association as a secretary to the ill-fated Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, enjoyed a long career as diplomat and advisor to both Elizabeth I and James I. Widely travelled, he was an avid connoisseur of art and architecture, multilingual in several languages, and an inveterate letter write (over 500 survive).
[48] Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 157.
[49] O’Connell, Loeber, “Eyrecourt Castle,” op. cit., pp. 47, 48 (ftn. 20); Knight of Glin, Peill, Irish Furniture, op. cit., p. 28.
[50] Geoffrey Beard, Craftsmen and Interior Decoration in England, 1660-1820 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), pp. xix, 29; Grace Lawless Lee, The Huguenot Settlements in Ireland (London: Longman, Green, 1936), p. 12.
[51] Mulligan, “Realm of the Irish Country House,” op. cit., p. 97.
[52] Geoffrey Beard, The Work of Christopher Wren (Edinburgh, UK: John Bartholomew & Son, 1982), p. 20; Paul Jeffrey, The City Churches of Christopher Wren (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), p. XVII.
[53] G. Beard, C. A. Knott, “Edward Pearce’s Work at Sudbury,” Apollo (April 2000), pp. 43-48; Beard, Craftsmen, op. cit., p. 68. See also Katherine Eustace, “Edward Pearce,” DNB. Vol. 43, pp. 277-279.
[54] Homan Potterton, “A New Pupil of Edward Pierce: William Kidwell,” Burlington Magazine, Vol. 114, No. 837 (December 1972), pp. 864-867.
[55] O’Connell, Loeber, “Eyrecourt Castle,” op. cit., p. 40.
[56] Eileen Gormanston, A Little Kept (London: Sheed and Ward, 1953), pp. 75-76.
[57] Dooley, Decline of the Big House in Ireland, op. cit., pp. 286-287 (Tables 7.1, 7.4); there is a five-month gap in these tables from August through December, 1921.
[58] Melvin, Estates and Landed Society, op. cit., pp. xix, 121, 94, 121, 72, 81, 111.
[59] Terrence Dooley, The Rise and Fall of the Dukes of Leinster, 1872-1948: Love, War, Debt and Madness (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014), pp. 127-128; Dooley, Decline of the Big House in Ireland, op. cit., pp. 91, 113-114.
[60] Melvin, Estates and Landed Society, op. cit., p. 152.
[61] Ibid., p. 140; Dooley, The Rise and Fall of the Dukes of Leinster, op. cit., pp. 207-208; Roy Strong, Marcus Binney, John Harris, et al, The Destruction of the Country House, 1875-1975 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 107. Lady Chapman had long been estranged from her husband, the seventh baronet, who deserted her in favor of the family’s governess, with whom he sired five children, the second of whom, Thomas Edward Lawrence, is better known today as Lawrence of Arabia. Samson is now in the collection of the Gemälde Gallery, State Museum of Berlin. For the financial meltdown of that other great Irish family, the Ormonds, see Dooley, ibid, p. 138; Mark Bence-Jones, Twilight of the Ascendancy (London: Constable, 1987), pp. 263, 302-304. See also Mark Bence-Jones, “The Changing Picture of the Irish Landed Gentry,” Burke’s Landed Gentry of Ireland, op. cit, pp. XVII-XXI.
[62] Cumberland, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 144. To be fair, the turn-of-the-century photograph of the drawing room reproduced in this article does show a small bookcase to the right of the fireplace, the volumes in which appear to be leather-bound.
[63] For the Vanderbilt marriage see Wayne Craven, “European Aristocracy and American Parvenus,” Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2009), pp. 25-31.
[64] Dooley, Decline of the Big House in Ireland, op. cit., p. 89.
[65] Knight of Glin, Peill, Irish Furniture, op. cit., p. 31.
[66] Lever, Charles O’Malley, op. cit., p. 7.
[67] Ben Procter, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863-1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 19.
[68] Ibid., pp. 17, 165, 44.
[69] When Joseph Pulitzer attempted to establish and fund a school of journalism at Columbia University in 1892, its then president refused to consider it. James McGrath Morris, Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), pp. 376-379.
[70] Donald J. Hagerty, “Meeting Mr. Hearst’s Headlines: The Newspaper and Magazine Illustrations of Maynard Dixon,” California State Library Foundation Bulletin, No. 86 (2007), p. 6.
[71] Ben Procter: William Randolph Hearst: Final Edition, 1911-1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 6.
[72] Procter, Hearst, Early Years, op. cit., p. 193; Procter, Hearst, Final Edition, op. cit., p. 121.
[73] Marion Davies, The Times We Had: Life with William Randolph Hearst, eds. P. Pfau, K. S. Marx (New York: Ballantine, 1975), p. 57.
[74] Procter, Hearst: Final Edition, op. cit., pp. 94, 112; Procter, Hearst: Early Years, op. cit., p. 70.
[75] Anne Edwards, “Marion Davies’ Ocean House: The Santa Monica Palace Ruled by Hearst’s Mistress,” Architectural Digest, April 1994, pp. 170-175, cont. 277; John Harris, Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 221; Procter, Hearst: Final Edition, ibid., p. 130.
[76] Another tycoon of the times was a guest, Joseph P. Kennedy, also enamored with a Hollywood film star who accompanied him, Gloria Swanson.
[77] Nancy Rubin, John Hays Hammond, Jr. A Renaissance Man in the Twentieth Century (Gloucester, MA: Hammond Museum, 1987), p. 17.
[78] James Charles Roy, “Letters to and From County Galway Emigrants 1843-1856,” JGAHS, Vol. 56 (2004), p. 152 (ftn. 117).
[79] Procter, Hearst, Final Edition, op. cit., p. 203.
[80] Howard M. Colvin, “Recycling the Monasteries: Demolition and Reuse by the Tudor Government, 1537-47,” Essays in English Architectural History (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 52-66; John Harris, Echoing Voices: More Memories of a Country House Snoop (London: John Murray, 2002), p. 52.
[81] L. F. Salzman, ed., A History of the County of Sussex: Vol. 7, The Rape of Lewes, (London: Victorian County History, 1940), pp. 181-186; Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., p. 14; Malcolm Airs, “John Thorpe,” DNB, Vol. 54, pp. 668-669.
[82] Giles Worsley, England’s Lost Houses: from the Archives of “Country Life” (London: Aurum Press, 2002), p. 7.
[83] See S. Marsden, D. McLaren, In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), pp. 22-23, 82-83; Mark Bence-Jones, Burke’s Guide to Country Houses, Volume I, Ireland (London: Burke’s Peerage, 1978) pp. 110-112.
[84] John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 125.
[85] Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., pp. 222, 306 (ftn. 24).
[86] Ibid., pp. 56, 209.
[87] Ibid., p. 152.
[88] Robert Smith, “Critic’s Notebook: Rooms with a View of History,” New York Times, January 14, 2000.
[89] Tinniswood, The Long Weekend, op. cit., p. 23; Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., p. 111.
[90] Harris, ibid., pp. 112-113.
[91] Ibid., pp. 252-256.
[92] Tinniswood, The Long Weekend, op. cit., pp. 41-42.
[93] Craven, “European Aristocracy and American Parvenus,” op. cit., p. 9.
[94] Tinniswood, The Long Weekend, op. cit., p. 133.
[95] “Statue of Christ Embroils Epstein,” New York Times, October 23, 1937, p. 19. “Consummatum Est” (“It is finished”) were Christ’s last words, according to St. John’s Gospel. Epstein’s response was succinct: “I shall take no notice of what others think.” The piece is in the collection of National Gallery Scotland.
[96] “Fragonards Moved to New Frick Home: Paintings to be Set in Drawing Room Designed for them by Sir Charles Allom,” New York Times, March 16, 1915, p. 10; Harris, Echoing Voices, op. cit., p. 111.
[97] Allom sold this house ten years later for $650,000. “Madison Av. Sale Closed by Cable,” New York Times, January 28, 1930, p. 45.
[98] Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., p. 301 (ftn. 240).
[99] “Houses of Augustinian Canons: Priory of Badenstoke,” A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 3, eds. R. B. Pugh, E. Crittal (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), internet resource.
[100] Enfys McMurray, Hearst’s Other Castle (Bridgend, WAL: Seren, 1999), p. 39.
[101] Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., p. xv.
[102] “England’s Masterpieces,” New York Times, March 26, 1912, p. 12; “‘The Blue Boy’ Sold: Coming to America,” New York Times, October 18, 1921, pp. 1, 11; James E. Thorpe, Henry Edwards Huntington: A Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), p. 438. Huntington was also an avid book collector; he established in his will the famous Huntington Library, which opened a year after his death in 1927. The duke of Westminster sold his London mansion, Grosvenor House, three years later for £370,000.
[103] Thomas Rohan, Confessions of a Dealer (London: Mills & Boon Ltd., 1924), p. 90; Harris, Moving Rooms, op. cit., pp. vii, 10.
[104] “Sinn Fein Storm Sweeps St. Regis,” New York Times, June 26, 1919, pp. 1, 3, 26; June 27, 1919, p. 8; July 14, 1919, p. 10.
[105] The “vendor” of the properties was Eyre’s wife, née Louisa Butler. Excepted from the sale was the “entire internal fabric of Eyrecourt Castle or any part thereof (including the front Hall Door and Doorway, to be removable by the vendor,”) i.e. the architectural elements purchased by Allom. For the legal notice, see ftn. 29. Also excepted was the church and graveyard by the main gate, currently overgrown. Special mention was made in the auction catalogue for one William Bell, evidently an old family retainer, who lived in the Mall Gate Lodge leading into the village, for which he paid a weekly rent of sixpence. One other servant was also provided for, in a fashion: Michael Higgins, in exchange for a weekly salary of twelve shillings and sixpence, was to be allowed to live in another of the estate’s gate cottages (with its garden, rent free), plus the right to graze a cow and a calf on the demesne’s lawn, in return for which he would provide “light duties as a labourer on the property.” Auction catalogue courtesy of Michael Clarke, Eyrecourt.
[106] “Catalogue of Exhibits,” The Daily Telegraph Exhibition of Antiques and Works of Art, Olympia, July 19-August 1, 1928, pp. 37, 49, 136, 195-198, 261-262.
[107] O’Connell, Loeber, “Eyrecourt Castle,” op. cit., p. 47. Other comments on the ruinous state of Eyrecourt and Eyreville include: The Knight of Glin, D. K. Griffin, N. K. Robinson, Vanishing Country Houses of Ireland (Dublin: The Irish Architectural Archive, The Irish Georgian Society, 1988), pp. 71-72; Maurice Craig, The Architecture of Ireland: From the Earliest Times to 1880 (1992), pp. 141, 144.
[108] Melvin, Estates and Landed Society, op. cit., p. 121.
[109] William Butler Yeats, “At Galway Races,” The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 95.
[110] A. J. Loomie, “Sir Henry Wotton,” DNB, Vol. 60, p. 381.
[111] Dorothea Cole, “Elizabeth Bowen,” Dictionary of Irish Biography, eds. J. McGuire, J. Quinn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Vol. I, p. 693.
[112] Elizabeth Bowen, The Last December (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), p. 303.
[113] Houses similar to Eyrecourt in Ireland include Beaulieu House, Co. Louth (still extant) and Burton House, County Cork (burnt in 1690). Bence-Jones, Burke’s Guide to Country Houses, op. cit., pp. 122, 34, 50; Harbison, Potterton, Sheehy, Irish Art and Architecture, op. cit., p. 123.
[114] A. J. Liebling, “The Man Who Changed the Rules,” Just Enough Liebling: Classic Work by the Legendary “New Yorker” Writer (New York: North Point Press, 2004), p. 442; Procter, Hearst: Final Edition, op. cit., pp. 225-226; “Onward and Upward with the Arts: Monastery for Sale,” The New Yorker, February 1, 1941, p. 33.
[115] Unsuccessfully, it would appear. Other sources say the sum in question was £409,000. See Tinniswood, The Long Weekend, op. cit., p. 134; McMurray, Hearst’s Other Castle, op. cit., p. 40.
[116] Welles denied that Citizen Kane, one of the most influential movies ever made, had anything to do with Hearst. “In Kane, everything was invented,” he wrote, a transparent falsehood. Davies, The Times We Had, op. cit., Forward (unpaginated).
[117] Ceremonial swords and maces, symbols of civic authority, are commonplace artifacts in many towns and corporations throughout the British Isles. The origins of the Galway sword are somewhat obscure, but the blade appears to be of sixteenth-century origin and from Germany; it was a “working” sword, not meant for ornament. The hilt and pommel, however, are more elaborate ceremonial additions, and bear the marks of two known Galway City silversmiths. The mace, made in Dublin, was commissioned by Edward Eyre, mayor of the city from 1710-1712, and donated by him to the town. He was the son of Col. Eyre’s brother and companion in arms, referenced earlier in this narrative, and also named Edward. Both these artifacts ended up in the possession of the Blake family in the 1840s, allegedly as some sort of back payment for monies spent by a member of that family who happened to be mayor at the time. Hard pressed for money, a Miss Blake put these pieces on auction at Christie’s in London, 1935, where Hearst purchased them for £5,000, sending them first to St. Donat’s in Wales, then to San Simeon in 1938. Like the long-lost town seal of neighboring Athenry, it was finally returned to Galway City in 1960 by his widow and the Hearst Foundation. See “Sword and Mace Back to Galway,” The Irish Times, August 29, 1960; G. A. Hayes McCoy, “The Galway Mace and Sword,” JGAHS, Vol. 29 (1960-1961), pp. 15-36.
[118] The Detroit Institute of Arts, founded in 1885, houses one of the most important collections of art in the United States (it was the first museum in the country to buy a van Gough, 1922), but has always been on uncertain financial footing. In 1919, facing a critical shortfall in funds, it became a city department, with funding supplied from the municipal tax base, a satisfactory solution at the time as Detroit was booming. No so at the turn of the twentieth-first century, when the city declared bankruptcy, and the temporary manager began describing DIA’s collection as a potential “asset” that could help save the employee pension fund. In November of 2014, a “Grand Bargain” was reached (along with a billion dollars), that removed DIA from city ownership and made it a private charitable trust responsible for its own budgets. See Randy Kennedy, New York Times: “Detroit Institute of Arts Copes With Threat of Art Selloff” (October 2, 2013); “Fate of Detroit’s Art Hangs in the Balance” (December 3, 2013); “Detroit’s Art May Be Worth Billions, Report says” (July 9, 2014); “ ‘Grand Bargain’ Saves the Detroit Institute of Arts” (November 14, 2014); Larissa MacFarquhar, “What Money Can Buy,” The New Yorker, January 4, 2016, pp. 45-46.
Photo Credits: The three staircase images, courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts; the East Galway Hunt, courtesy of George Gossip; two photographs of Eyrecourt in the 1950s by Maurice Craig, courtesy of the Irish Architectural Archive; Hearst dinner party, © Hearst Castle®/CA State Parks; period room awaiting assembly, courtesy North Carolina Museum of Art.
Acknowledgements: Angela Bell-Morris, NCMA; Michael Clarke; John Cronin; Christy Cunniffe; Alan P. Darr, DIA; Aisling Dunne, IAA; Vickie Garagliano, CA State Parks; George Gossip; Alix Cochran Hackett; Renee Massarello, DIA; James Pethica, Williams College; Dana Blennerhassett Roy; Lynda Scheidecker, The William Randolph Hearst Foundations.
