Keeper of the Castle
June 2007
The last time I saw Randal, Viscount Dunluce, the 35-year-old bachelor was celebrating his purchase of a miniature at auction the previous day for half of its £1,500 high estimate. It was of his great-great-great grandmother Anne Catherine, Countess of Antrim, who, in the 1820s, had made some of the more fashionable architectural additions to his home.“I was quite pleased with that purchase. And it came with a plait of her hair. I like to buy things that pertain to this house,” Randal said, with a wave around the drawing room of Glenarm Castle, his ancestral home in the northernmost reaches of Northern Ireland.
Five years later, when I check in with the young collector, who will one day inherit his father’s title, Earl of Antrim, I see he’s still at it, buying, selling and refining a collection deeply steeped in his family’s 300-plus-year history. Today the erstwhile bachelor is married, to wife, Aurora, with a wee heir of his own, the Honorable Alexander, a toddler who will grow up in a far different Glenarm than did his father.
“The house was quite neglected,” says Randal of the condition a decade ago, when his father passed him the keys. “When I was little all of us lived here—four generations under one roof—with my great-grandmother’s sitting room in the drawing room. The roof leaked and there had been fire damage over the years.”
But Randal has always felt affection for his Irish home and dreamed of restoring it, an ambition he’s realizing today as he commutes every fortnight from London, where he works as an investment manager. The Irish lord, whose family name is McDonnell, descends from Scotland’s Clan Donald, of which his father is a chief. Since the 16th century, they’ve had a presence in this corner of Northern Ireland.
For a collector whose family includes sculptor Angela Sykes (his grandmother), painter Hector McDonnell (his uncle), artist Flora McDonnell (his sister) and the head of the conservation department at Tate Britain, Alexander, Earl of Antrim (his father), restoring the art and antiques of Glenarm Castle is as much a priority as a new roof.
“The condition of the pictures and furniture was very poor, so I rolled out a conservation program,” he says. “My father has been cleaning the pictures for me, and once a year a furniture restorer from Belfast arrives. I have a budget, and we do what it allows. But it’s made a huge difference.”
The limited budget has forced collecting decisions at Glenarm. Randal took a hard look at the castle’s inventory and decided to focus on acquiring Irish and English antiques and paintings and, works of local interest, and on reclaiming those of Glenarm’s treasures that had been sold off over the years. To finance new acquisitions, he consigned at auction pieces that he felt didn’t fit the character of the house. “I sold a couple of vulgar Louis XV secretaries my grandfather bought back in the 1950s,” Randal explains. “I thought they didn’t look right in the house. I can do that with a clear conscience. It’s all about making the place more coherent.”Just a few Continental pieces, such an 18th-century French roll-top bureau, survived the cull, as well as a pair of early 19th-century Russian chairs that Randal’s great uncle, antiques dealer Daniel Sykes, left to his grandmother.
The fun, of course, has been tracking down pieces that were original to Glenarm, but some of the finest bits are institutionalized due to a 19th-century inheritance dispute between two McDonnell sisters that forced the family to pay off enormous legal fees. “Annoyingly, they sold the wrong assets,” says Randal dryly, referring to a Christie’s sale in the 1850s that included paintings by Canaletto, Holbein, van Dyck and Stubbs that the fifth Earl of Antrim, “The Collecting Earl,” had assembled a century earlier.
More attainable are pieces such as a 17th-century book of panegyric speeches written to commemorate the exploits of the second Earl of Antrim during the English Civil War that turned up recently in a small auction house in Somerset. “I have friends in the antiques business, specialists who look out for me,” says Randal, “but one can also go to auction Web sites and just put in keywords.”
Randal also looks for paintings that relate to Northern Ireland; he recently purchased an 18th-century watercolor of the Giant’s Causeway, the region’s spectacular 60 million-year-old rock formation, by J. Nixon and a painting of the Glens of Antrim by Andrew Nicholl, a founding member of the Belfast Association of Artists.
One of Randal’s most recent victories was “Boys Dancing on the Seashore,” a 4- by-6-foot seascape by George Romney (1734–1802), one of the artist’s “fancy pictures,” which he secured last summer at Christie’s for $44,444, below the low estimate ($47,169–$75,471). The painting will join Glenarm’s Romney portrait of a military officer, which hangs in the entrance hall in Glenarm. “We know Romney did the head,” says Randal, “not the shoulders.” Randal has also commissioned paintings of Glenarm’s newly restored walled garden by his uncle, Hector McDonnell, a realist painter recognized as one of the finest Irish figurative artists today.
The works will add to the collection’s 18 equestrian paintings by Thomas Butler, an equestrian painter, commissioned by “The Gambling Earl,” who, Randal says, squandered the family money on bloodstock. Randal found the pictures in the attic and had them cleaned and reframed by his father. The horses depicted match those in the Gambling Earl’s 18thcentury stud book, which was also discovered in Glenarm.
Other treasures include one of 18thcentury painter Francis Wheatley’s most celebrated works, “The Marquess and Marchioness of Antrim,” which Randal says Wheatley tried at one point to buy back. The painting has been loaned to the National Gallery in Dublin. Glenarm also has probably the largest collection of the works of 19th-century naval painter George Chambers outside of the royal household.Glenarm’s Irish furniture does not disappoint, with three rare wake tables, a 19thcentury desk from Carlton House, a yellow silk–upholstered 19th-century sofa, a pair of 18th-century scalloped-back chairs and a suite of 1840s red leather club-like dining chairs that one Mr. Whitbread, a brewer, sent to the family because he found the Irish Chippendales uncomfortable when he came to visit. “A rather nice house present,” says Randal. “And they are the most comfortable dining chairs—though they encourage slobbish posture.”
Like any great house, the castle has its share of ephemera: an extremely rare Jacobite drinking glass, a chest said to be from the Spanish Armada ship “Girona,” (which wrecked nearby), a collection of 18thcentury chinoiserie, a French 19th-century skittles game and bed linens from 1754 hand-embroidered by Lady Antrim.
One exciting discovery seems to lead to the next. In between option trades in his London office, the future 15th Earl of Antrim is hot on the trail of a 10,000-yearold set of giant Irish elk antlers that were once at Adare Manor in Limerick. The Collecting Earl would be proud.
Sallie Brady is an ART & ANTIQUES New York correspondent.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
The Irish Landmark Trust, Dublin and Belfast
Includes Glenarm’s restored Barbican Gate among its properties. 011.35.3.16.70.47.33. www.irishlandmark.com.
Ireland’s Painters (1600–1940) by Anne Crookshank and The Knight of Glin (Yale University Press, 2002).
Irish Furniture by The Knight of Glin and James Peill (Yale University Press, 2007).
For an extensive in-print booklist relating to Irish art, antiques, architecture and decorative studies, contact The Irish Georgian Society. Dublin, 011.35.3.16.76.70.53; New York, 212.534.4849. www.igs.ie