Written by The excellent and eminent Irish Georgian Society, in partnership with Dublin City Council’s Heritage Office, is just about to deliver a series of very significant talks, starting barely a week from now, on Tuesday 1st October.
It is a series i am very proud to be involved in as it explores in depth and detail a subject very close to my heart. Namely how Dublin has been depicted through the centuries in early maps, prints and engravings and other old images.
Speakers include Dr Joseph Brady, Paul Ferguson, Dr Orla FitzPatrick, Rob Goodbody, Arran Henderson, Graham Hickey, William Laffan, Professor Colm Lennon, Dr Kathryn Milligan and Dr John Montague.
For lovers of Dublin, its history and heritage, its artworks and its historic architecture, this is a field with rich pickings. There much here to savour, learn and enjoy.
For people more interested in art, and in antique maps, prints and engravings, the appeal is obvious. For a tour guide like me, however, obsessed with making connections between Dublin’s history, the layout of its streets and its historic architecture (both vanished and extant) this series of talks is both a Godsend, and a Goldmine.
Why I am so excited? Well, just focus on maps for example for a moment. To explore an apparently obvious fact, any vintage or historic map is a snapshot, giving us a visual understanding of a city now vanished in time. Old historic maps feature vanished building, monasteries and city walls, old gardens and orchards, former hospitals, orphanages, workhouses and prisons, that have all long since disappeared.
Accordingly these maps have much to teach us about our city, and about almost every theme and aspect of its history.
The image of a building also gives us vital clues about its previous appearance, its surrounding buildings at the time the images was made and much more besides.
To take one well-known example, John Speed’s 1610 map of Dublin (or Dubline, as Speed spelt it) It shows us all the principal public buildings and ecclesiastical sites extant in that year.
We can see how Dublin Castle forms the south-east corner of the walled, medieval city of Dublin. How that wall itself in its entirety was punctuated with watchtowers and great city gates, like the Dame (Dam) Gate and the Newgate. (All now gone) We see how the city still possessed but one solitary, and even by 1610, one very old bridge, which predated the Anglo-Normans.
John Speed’s 1610 map of Dublin, with later hand colouring.
Of course the visual information on offer goes much further than that. To take just one type of example, the monasteries are mostly still here! This is despite the map dating over 70 years after Henry VIII’s Suppression of the Monasteries (enforced of course, by the delightful Thomas Cromwell).
True, the religious communities that once lived in these religious houses have been ushered out. But the complex of buildings that formed say the great Cistercian Abbey of Saint Mary’s just north of the river Liffey, clearly still stands intact. This is the same land that would later be developed by Humphrey Jervis in the later 1600s. And in its eastern and northern portions, later again by Luke Gardiner the Elder, in the early 1700s.
Likewise, the former Dominican Priory of Saint Saviours standing on teh north bank of the Liffey is also still visible in Speed’s map. Admittedly the lawyers had moved in by now. The barristers were in possession of the Dominicans’ former home. It was now, for a period, the King’s Inns. The Kings Inns as an institution (not a building) dates incidentally all the way back to 1541, making it earlier and older institution than Trinity College.
Later again, over 150 years after Speed’s map, the site was repurposed yet again, in the late 18th century, into Law Courts (the Four Courts) and the Public Records office, transformed by Georgian architects Thomas Cooley and James Gandon.
But long before that date, the city would be recorded again, in both pictorial and in map form, by Charles Brooking.
Speed’s 1610 map is invaluable, a priceless resource. Brooking’s 1727 map is also extraordinary. When we look closer, we see it in fact presents three separate aspects, namely a map; a series of “vignettes” (small pictures, often in a border) of the city’s principal buildings and finally, we see at the very top of the sheet, a panoramic view or “diorama” overlooking the city.
Now bear in mind that this all dates from 1727, before Dublin’s great Georgian re-building had taken hold.
That really hits home when we see for example, how- while Grafton Street and Dawson Street were already built- Kildare Street, Molesworth Street and their surrounding area are merely “laid out”. In other words they have been planned, maybe even staked out (with sicks and twine) but nearly all the actual house still remain to be built.
Wherever we look, at different details from Brooking maps and thus at different areas of the city, we can see and learn more.
If you look closer once again at the detail above, it reminds us that once upon a time, Saint Andrews’ Church, just off College Green – now a fine Victorian Gothic structure of spires and buttresses- was previously a completely different shape, in the form of an ellipse: although, colloquially it was always named “the Round Church”.
Look also, in the same detail above yet again, at the gardens behind Dublin Castle. Here we find another fascinating detail: look at the clutter of markets near the corner of Dame Street and Georges Lane. Which is what we now call Georges Street, not least since it was straightened and widened, much later in the 1700s by (who else?) the Wide Streets Commissioners.
One of the many exciting speakers in these IGS talks is Dr John Montague, currently the leading authority on the WSC. He will be showing us the WSC’s own maps, plans and drawings, as that powerful body set about transforming Dublin in the 1700s and 1800s.
Those markets mentioned above, incidentally, would also move, and transform. The ones that appear in the detail above, grouped near Georges lane and Dublin Castle (they were actually called “Castle markets” back then) were later closed and they moved to a new site, on the far side of Georges Lane/ Georges St.
Even this re-built version has been through many twists and turns since it re-located. But today we call that new, re-located version “the Georges Street Arcade”.
Another fabulous feature of Brooking’s map is his so-called of “vignettes” of the city’s principal monuments and buildings. These also provide a treasure trove for historians, architectural and art historians, for guides and all students of the city.
Brooking for example gives us amazing images of the statue of King George I which initially stood on Essex bridge (the statue was later re-located, to Dawson Street) There is striking depiction too of Dublin Castle, and this image is from soon enough after the 1684 fire, that the castle is still being rebuilt!
In another image in the same group of views, Brooking gives us an extremely useful picture of the Customs House as it appeared in the 1700s. (Or “the Crane” as Dubliners were wont to call it) The Dublin Customs House, central to the capital’s commerce and prosperity, had moved before, and would move again later. But at this point in time it stood approximately where the Clarence Hotel is today. Isn’t it magnificent? Note how it “the Crane” is the only building here set back from the river (to allow space for the loading and unloading of ships of course). Look also how the tall masted timber-built ships of the were able to come right up the Liffey, as far as this Customs House/ Crane. Later bridges would make that an impossibility.
It was the new location of James Gandon’s 1780s Customs House, much further east, at the bottom of Gardiner’s Street and Beresford Place, that would allow other, new bridges to be built further east. That single fact allowed the city to also move correspondingly eastwards. It also decimated the ancient trade of the ferrymen. But that is a story for another day.
Brooking’s giant page of imagery is a gift that keeps on giving. Most exciting of all perhaps is his panorama of Dublin, with huge amounts of important topographic information, including a skyline is dotted with windmills! Fellow guides will be well aware that one of these towers still remains today (The Smock tower, at the Digital Hub, off Thomas Street) But to see this in a skyline full of other windmills, and medieval churches, is a different proposition.
Themes like these will no doubt be discussed and illuminated further by speakers including the excellent Dr. Katy Mulligan, author and expert in pictorial depictions of Dublin.
Around twenty-five years after Brooking, another great cartographer made yet another famous map of Dublin. John Rocque’s survey of Dublin from around 1753 is one of teh greatmaops of any city in the world. Details from this wonderful resource are endlessly reproduced, in books about history, heritage, architecture, town planning and any other subject that touches on our city’s history. And rightly so. Such is the clarity, the rigour, and sheer level of detail in Rocque’s map, that it forever captured a city in the minds of its then inhabitants, and all its future inhabitants.
The scholar and historian Robert Goodbody, a man of rare erudition, will be using his talk to draw comparisons between Rocque’s Dublin Map and Rocque’s London map. Two extraordinary cities, each on the cusp and midst of great change, captured at this vital moment in the 1700s. Even in such a strong field of scholars and speakers, this is a talk I am especially looking forward to.
I do not want to give the impression however, that this series is focused on matters-cartographic. While some speakers will look at maps, other speakers such Graham Hickey and Katy Mulligan, will focus on more pictorial, artistic images created by painters and artists.
Take the subject of topographic city views, or “vedute” as they were known in Italy. Popularized and made fashionable by the Grand Tourists flocking through Venice, Florence, Naples and Rome in the 1700s; perfected by Venetian artists like Canaletto, and Roman ones like Panini, the City View is a form and genre almost synonymous with the 18th century.
It was not long before a keen local market for pictures of city views had also evolved in Ireland. Painting after painting; engraved print after print, recorded the great, new public buildings of Dublin. Needless to say, these images again have a vast amount to teach us about the character, culture and built fabric of our city at that time. They reveal vital clues about the buildings, costume, commerce and social life of the time.
Dublin near the Four Courts, attributed to John Nixon (c.1750- 1818) Water colour. ©National Gallery of Ireland.
Needless to say, the most famous exponent of the genre here in Dublin was James Malton, who had the good sense to engrave his images, allowing for mass-distribution. As gorgeous as they are however, these are not merely pretty “nostalgic” pictures. Malton has much to teach us, if we only learn how to look.
In one of his famed 1790s views of Dublin, a small throng of people cluster around a shop at the river end of Capel Street. (The street itself was a creation of 1600s entrepreneur and developer, Sir Humphrey Jervis) But why are these people congregated here? Only when we slow down and look closer, we see that this specially licensed shop sold the “Lotto” tickets of its day.
Capel Street, looking over bridge to Parliament Street, James Malton c.1793
Similar insights, and pleasant surprises await when we explore any of Malton’s famous views. Graham Hickey of the Dublin Civic Trust, a real expert on the prints, and a first-rate public speaker, will guide us through that process of looking and of engagement.
It is my honour to contribute the very final talk in the series. This falls exactly 2 months after the first talk, on Tues 10th December. (There is no talk on the week of Tuesday 28th October) In my presentation, with the use of many images and details I shall attempt to explore how Dublin has been captured in a series of Panoramas or Birds Eye Views, as they are known.
I will look briefly at one image of Dublin by the leading nineteenth century Irish artist and engraver James Mahony (sometimes spelt Mahoney) who lived from 1810–1879. Mahony is famous amongst historian, and those who study images of the history of 19th century Ireland, for his harrowing depictions of the Great Famine of the 1840s, created for London and English newspapers of the time, and attempting to bring home to that audience, the scale and depth of that catastrophic events then unfolding.
But Mahony was an artist of diverse and wide-ranging gifts. He also left us a virtuoso panoramic image of Dublin, imagined from a very high vantage point, showing us all across the city from the mountains to the sea, in a stunning water colour painting that I will try to do justice to in my talk. This reproduction below is a deliberately low-res version, for copyright reasons. Wait until we guide you some of the hidden, up-close details in our talk!
above: James Mahony Bird’s Eye View of Dublin, 1854, watercolour. ©National gallery of Ireland. Below: a small detail from James Mahony Bird’s Eye View of Dublin, 1854, ©National gallery of Ireland
Elsewhere in my talk I will look, at greater or lesser depth, at three other 19th century artists who also depicted Dublin from above. One of them is the talented Irish engineer- artist -cartographer- entrepreneur, Daniel Heffernan, with his fascinating image: an unusual, engaging hybrid between map and bird’s eye view.
In this image Heffernan brilliantly combines the virtues of a map with the attractive (and location-identifying) qualities of the bird’s eye view, with his beautiful little isometric drawings of key public buildings.
above: detail from Hefferenan 1860s map of Dublin, from a private collection. Not for reproduction.
The other two artist and panoramas I aim to discuss are the master artist-engraver Symth, who in the 1840s capturing Dublin for the readers of the Illustrated London News, and finally another English artist H. W. Brewer, who created a Dublin image from up high around 40 years years later, but in a very different style!
above: Birds Eye view of Dublin (detail, with later hand colouring) engraved by Smyth, first published 1846, as part of a supplement in the London Illustrated News, from a private collection. Not for reproduction.
below: Bird’s Eye View of Dublin, by H. W. Brewer 1890, detail, (showing the church of St Nicholas of Myra, Francis Street) from a private collection. Not for reproduction.
The ten consecutive evening talks commence on Tuesday 1st October and take place in person in the IGS’s City Assembly House, 58 South William Street (and live online too).
The talks are also recorded. Tickets holders for the online versions are also sent the recorded versions, which are valid for at least a week after the talk (possibly two weeks, please check the IGS own website).
Attendance at the talks incidentally is recognized by the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland as formal CPD (1 point per talk: 10 CPD talks for the whole course) and likewise by the Irish Planning Institute.
Finally, if you can attend in person, these talks have the additional attraction of being held in the beautiful surroundings of IGS’s home, the City Assembly House, at 58 South William Street. With poetric symentry this is a venue that is immortalized by James Malton himself.
Even this picture below, by Malton, conceals/ reveals some remarkable social history. But I think I have given away more than enough already. If you really want to learn about Dublin, and how it has been imagined, visualized, captured, recorded and understood through images, over the last 200-400 years, then join us for this extraordinary series of talks.
above: James Malton, South William Street with Powerscourt Townhouse and (foreground-right) the City Assembly House.
Practical details of Talks.
In person talk cost €15 individually (or €12.50 for online attendance) or all nine talks can be booked for the discounted rate of €120 (or €90 for whole course virtual attendance)
Attendance at the talks is recognised by the RIAI (9 points for the whole course) and the Irish Planning Institute.
For further information on the programme and booking details, please go to the Irish Georgian Society’s website:
https://www.igs.ie/events/depicting-dublin-all-talks
https://www.igs.ie/events/depicting-dublin-all-talks
Depicting Dublin: understanding Dublin’s architecture, urban morphology and social history through early maps, prints, drawings and photographs.
Speakers include Dr Joseph Brady, Paul Ferguson, Dr Orla FitzPatrick, Rob Goodbody, Arran Henderson, Graham Hickey, William Laffan, Professor Colm Lennon, Dr Kathryn Milligan and Dr John Montague.