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Eccles Street stair bracket, late eighteenth century; Allenton stair bracket, early eighteenth century; collection of Peter Pearson; photo Sarah Durcan
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Eighteenth-century plaster fragments; collection of Peter Pearson; photo Sarah Durcan |
Peter Pearson's Collection of
Eighteenth-Century Artefacts
Peter Pearson has amassed a collection of eighteenth-century architectural fragments. The troubled history of these artefacts reveals their ambiguous position in Irish visual culture. By describing their display in Pearson's collection as a series of still lifes, a sense of their full historic and aesthetic meaning emerges.
Peter Pearson is well known as a conservationist and artist. During his efforts to prevent the demolition of historic buildings, he has amassed a collection of architectural fragments from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All of them have come from ruined houses in Dublin and around the country.
Pearson's collection raises a number of intertwining issues, not least concerning the circumstances in which it has evolved. Focusing on artefacts from the eighteenth century, this article explores the nature of the collection, how it has been displayed and what it means as a cultural resource for Ireland today.
It should be evident that the collection can be approached from a number of different angles and to the extent that it evades categorisation, it succeeds in opening up a field of critical investigation. First, one could take a taxonomic approach and classify these architectural specimens according to different areas of craftsmanship like joinery, plasterwork and ironwork and their respective nomenclature. Under joinery, for example, would come extensive collections of balusters, newel posts, stair brackets, window frames and architraves. They form an index to the building skills, architecture and design of the period. With a few exceptions, the identity of these masons, builders and artisans is largely unknown, pending further research.
Dislocated from their origins and function, the artefacts often emerge more prominently than ever before. For instance, we generally view staircases in their entirety; when an individual tread end or stair bracket is isolated, it emerges as a design feature in its own right. In a rare glimpse of the anonymous joiner, a stair bracket from Eccles Street reveals a hidden eighteenth-century pencil inscription on the reverse side: "...sent by the bearer 3 doz & 11 for the Lord Mayor signed Arthur Mooney."
Secondly, there is the provenance of each object. The entire collection represents a series of case histories centred around a number of derelict or demolished 'big houses'. These involve a range of geographic locations and the social and economic conditions in which the houses were built. The bedraggled fragments have the metonymic power to evoke the houses from which they came. For example, a small plaster detail is a remnant of the greater structure that was Frascati House. In the abject state of these displaced elements we see the decline and fall of an entire culture. It is tempting to view them nostalgically as the last vestiges of what became known as the Ascendancy class.
The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to distance and sentimentalise the past rather than engage with the dynamics of history. However, any approach to Irish eighteenth-century studies must deal with the literary and cultural traditions which have sprung up around the image of the 'big house'. Isolated at the end of a long driveway, it is traditionally seen as the locus of power in an economy centred on the tenant and the landowner, the colonised and the coloniser. In their fragmented state, Pearson's artefacts present an interesting opportunity to view the 'big house' from the other end of the telescope as it were.
At this point, it is worth rehearsing the origins of these houses. Maurice Craig, in his architectural history of Ireland, recounts how many of them were constructed during a building boom in the first half of the eighteenth century.1 Following the violence of plantation and colonisation, the emergent land-owning class built houses in order to stabilise their power and position. It was at this time that the Penal Laws were introduced, which effectively created a predominantly Protestant aristocratic culture. The new gentry had to employ native labour and thus began the development of highly-skilled local craftsmen. By the end of the century some of them were working to standards that surpassed their counterparts in England.
The dominant architectural style of the period was the Palladianism introduced by Sir Edward Lovett Pearce and followed up by his successor Richard Castle. Irish Palladianism is characterised by a lay-out based on a central block flanked with low spread wings. The best known examples, which date from the first half of the eighteenth century, are Castletown and Carton in Co. Kildare and Summerhill, Co. Meath which was demolished in the late fifties. In some country houses the Palladian wings were used to accommodate farm offices and outbuildings.
The stereotypical image of the 'big house' can obscure a quieter vein of domestic architecture. There were also minor gentry who continued building late into the century. Along with wealthy farmers and tradesmen, they formed a middle-class stratum. Their modest houses have often survived better than grander mansions which have fallen into spectacular ruin. Many of them have not been securely attributed and they are thought to have been designed by master builders who had assimilated the patterns of classical architecture. What is notable is the success with which they adapted these styles without lapsing into provincialism. Thus one cannot view the architecture of the country house as the hegemony of one culture over another when the designs themselves were absorbed into the language of the local builders. Many of Pearson's artefacts come from these less well-known medium to small houses.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the demise of the 'big house' and demesne has been inexorable. Many of these houses are either no longer extant or in ruins. The following is an example of the type of case history behind the artefacts in Pearson's collection. The artefact is a carved timber stair bracket from Allenton, Old Bawn, Tallaght, Co. Dublin. Allenton was a medium-sized country house built between 1720 and 1730, on to the front of an earlier house. Later in the mid-eighteenth century, it was bought and given its name by a Lord Mayor of Dublin, Sir Timothy Allen. In January 1984, the house surfaced as a news story following an illegal demolition carried out over the New Year bank holiday by the owner, Kevin Kirby. Subsequently that year, the county council was forced to authorise the demolition of what had become a dangerous structure. This is a pattern of events familiar to conservationists like Pearson. Artefacts like the Allenton stair bracket have survived against a background of wilful neglect, demolition and general entropy.
Clearly any historical object needs to be put in context in order to achieve its full meaning. This raises questions of display and interpretation which have become particularly problematic in relation to what we call heritage. David Brett has analysed the ambiguous meaning of the word and in particular how heritage centres present the past. 2
In his account, the privately-funded development of Strokestown House and Famine Museum in Co. Roscommon emerges as a positive example as opposed to others which over-simplify the complexities of history. It does this most obviously by siting the Famine Museum in the grounds of the very place which was insulated from that traumatic event--the 'big house'.
The conservation of Strokestown House, which Pearson assisted on, is an exemplar of the way in which a big house can become the focus of "a new significance in an Ireland now radically different to the Ireland which produced it." 3 If Strokestown offers the opportunity to reposition our view of the big house, then the artefacts in Pearson's collection have a similar potential to open up a wider social history. The heritage these artefacts preserve is not only the culture of the aristocratic landowner but also a native building tradition, whose history has yet to be written. Above all, they raise the issue of why the state has been largely indifferent to the preservation of this particular heritage.
It has to be said that Pearson, along with other individuals and the Irish Georgian Society, has pioneered the protection of eighteenth-century buildings in the face of state lethargy. As Pearson ironically points out, he has taken a perverse pleasure in collecting artefacts that are not valued by official museums. 4 The National Museum of Ireland has nothing to match what Pearson has collected. If they do have any similar material, it seems to be buried in storage. The sorts of objects in his collection have not been officially validated as authentic heritage. It is possible that this lack of interest might be to do with a nationalistic cultural tradition that prefers to market a Celtic myth or the paraphernalia of 1916 rather than the complex inheritance from a colonial past. It is interesting to note the titles of pamphlets such as Volunteer Glass produced by the National Museum and wonder what is prioritised as worthy of displaying and documenting.
From the beginning Pearson has aimed to find a permanent home for the collection where it can be displayed and its contents catalogued. In the meantime he has had to make do with temporary exhibitions. It was shown most recently, with the support of the Irish Georgian Society, in a conservation context at two weekend showcases of traditional building skills held in Dublin and Cork. 5 On these occasions, Pearson, helped by Kevin Mulligan, exhibited the artefacts together with documentation of the original houses.
On display, clustered in small groupings, they read as a series of still lifes. Fragments of decorative plasterwork in a variety of yellowed tones, are arrayed on the shelves of a glass cabinet. Removed from their original settings of formal reception rooms and halls, these pieces of plaster lose their coherence as part of a decorative scheme and with it their meaning as signifiers of wealth and pomp. The levelling process of dereliction brings out the fact that they are, after all, pieces of craft complete with bits of protruding horsehair and plaster dust. Like a Morandi still life they play on an ambiguity of form and function pervaded with a sense of mortality.
David Brett has indicated the pitfalls of applying aesthetic categories to historical subject matter whilst acknowledging that history is mediated by narrative and aesthetic imagery. 6 The aesthetic sensibility of Pearson as a collector has ensured that his artefacts retain a sense of their troubled history. For instance, the blackened plaster medallions from Rosemount, Clonskeagh, Co. Dublin, embody the gradual process of decay, fire and finally the demolition of the house in the mid-eighties.
A second characteristic of Pearson's taste is that he has had the independence to collect items which would simply be overlooked by many people including academics who are often narrowly focused on particular formal categories. From the lowly eighteenth-century forged iron nail to ornate plasterwork; every aspect of domestic architecture is included. Surveying his heterogeneous collection of ironmongery such as latches, hinges and locks and other household elements such as architraves, panelling and wallpaper, an anthropological image of a house emerges.
There is an art to collecting which is more than simply fieldwork or the acquisition of objects. Great nineteenth-century collectors such as Pitt Rivers and Sir John Soane amassed eclectic collections that could only be put together by an idiosyncratic individual, free to follow their own taste. The anthropologist James Clifford has charted the history of collecting, pointing out that it is always subjective despite institutional attempts to rationalise it. He goes on to say that "Ideally the history of its own collection and display should be a visible aspect of any exhibition." 7 Western museums have had to consider the ambiguity of their displays from other cultures and the colonial mindset underpinning the activities of collectors like the notorious Lord Elgin or, in Ireland, the collections of Chester Beatty and Lord Beit.
For a contemporary collector like Peter Pearson the circumstances are entirely different. Nonetheless there is an ethical dimension to his collection. In theory the law protects listed buildings while in reality, were it not for individuals like Pearson who take the decision to intervene in this grey area and negotiate with demolition crews, valuable artefacts would be destroyed or disappear. It is ironic that a collection that is founded not on purchases but on investing voluntary time and effort is actually preserving an irreplaceable, valuable strand of Irish visual culture. Surely it is time for the state to give it the recognition it deserves.
Sarah Durcan is an artist and lecturer at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. She is compiling a photographic inventory of Peter Pearson's collection with funding from the Irish Georgian Society.
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