Celtic Character
October 2007
IF IRISH EYES ARE SMILING, it may be due to the economic boom the country has been enjoying since the 1990s, familiarly known as the "Celtic Tiger." This new prosperity has heightened interest among Irish collectors and a sprinkling of international collectors in Ireland’s decorative arts, particularly Georgian-period furniture.Historically, Irish furniture has had more than its share of critics. In his 1907 book Old English Furniture of the 17th and 18th Centuries, Owen Wheeler describes it as being of "good material and carcase construction, but poor outline and inferior carving." Several years later, furniture historian and connoisseur R.W. Symonds called attention to Irish furniture’s "heavy appearance, superfluity of carved ornament and absence of elegant and graceful lines."
Opinions did not appreciably change during the remainder of the 20th century. Dublin dealers Paul and Chris Johnston remember their father shipping containers of Irish furniture to the United States in the 1960s and ’70s. That continued into the early ’80s when the supply began to dry up and shipping declined. "Money was in short supply at the time," says Paul, "and whatever was available was not spent on antiques." He adds that 18th-century furniture was considered colonial because it carried a strong English influence, and that didn’t go well with the Irish. By contrast, the simpler Irish furniture shipped to the United States was popular with Americans because it resembled Philadelphia styles but was much less expensive.
The publication this year of Irish Furniture by the Knight of Glin, Desmond FitzGerald, current president of the Irish Georgian Society, and James Peill, a European furniture specialist at Christie’s New York, is timely. The book is the first definitive study of the subject from the earliest times to the union of Ireland and England in 1800. (Angela Alexander, a Ph.D. candidate at University College Dublin, is currently writing a thesis on 19th-century furniture, which will become a companion volume to Irish Furniture sometime in the future.)
FitzGerald, a former curator at Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Christie’s representative in Ireland during the ’70s, has long been passionate about his country’s decorative arts and amassed an archive of more than 2,000 photographs of furniture over a 35-year period. "As recently as a decade ago," he says, "Irish furniture was regarded as overloaded in its ornament, flatly carved and unfashionable." To illustrate its lowly status, FitzGerald recounts the sale of a table at a Dublin auction in the 1960s. The final bid was £3 10 shillings, or about $15. The purchaser was Desmond Guinness, founder of the Irish Georgian Society, who was surprised when it was subsequently revealed as an important 18th-century serving table from Ballynagarde in Limerick. It was later resold privately for six figures.
Prices for the best pieces are now in the high five figures. At Christie’s New York sale of English furniture in April, an Irish George III mahogany side table, circa 1760, with a carved shell on the frieze and apron, sold for $90,000. About a half-dozen Irish pieces are usually included in Christie’s English furniture sales; the next is October 11.
The most obvious characteristic of Irish furniture is exuberance. It is both bold and idiosyncratic in design. How else can one describe carvings of fierce lions’ faces, eagle heads, birds and snakes on tables, chairs and settees? Taking the animal motif one step further are legs with a bulging muscle or fetlock just above square-shaped hairy paws or webbed claw and ball feet, unique to Irish furniture. "You can trace many of these grotesque ornaments to Celtic book illustrations and early Christian and medieval carvings," says FitzGerald.
In his 1845 novel The Cock and Anchor, the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu captured the sinister nature of such furnishings: "Two or three tables of various sizes of dark shining wood, with legs after the fashion of the nether limbs of hippogriffs and fauns, seemed about to walk from their places and to stomp and claw at random about the room."
Other favored motifs were derived from classical antiquity. A visit to Greek and Roman sites was a requirement for an 18th-century gentleman’s education, as was familiarity with ancient literature. Scallop shells, associated with Venus, the goddess of love, were carved on table aprons and legs, and baskets of flowers, a classical symbol of eternal spring, appeared on chair rails and the pediments of mirrors. To fill up the blank background between the heavily carved areas, the carver would often prick the surface with tiny dots, giving the effect of a garden trellis. This method, called "diapering," is a distinctly Irish feature, notes Peill.
A simpler, more elegant style of furniture was often used in secondary rooms and smaller country houses in Ireland. There were unassuming little tea tables, plain card tables with cabriole legs and a small drawer in the apron and long tables with straight legs that may have seen service in the dining room of a local squire.
It is not widely known that many Irish craftsmen immigrated to America in the 17th century and continued to do so well into the 18th century. They settled in Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston and a handful in Virginia’s Rappahannock River Basin. Hercules Courtenay arrived in Philadelphia in 1765 and worked as an indentured carver and gilder in the workshop of cabinetmaker Benjamin Randolph. A wing chair in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art attributed to Randolph features an apron with a carved trellis background that resembles Irish work. Other Irish craftsmen who came to America included Lambert Emerson, who set up a mirror business in Philadelphia in 1731; Abraham Maddocks, an upholsterer from Dublin, who settled in Charleston; and James McCormick, a cabinetmaker from Dublin, who worked in Petersburg, Virginia.
"As the Celtic Tiger has leapt into the 21st century, there has been an appreciation for the arts of the 18th century, especially furniture," says Peill. "Its refined proportions and Celtic nuances in the detailing make for a potent cocktail."
New York correspondent Doris
Goldstein is a freelance writer
specializing in the decorative arts.