Fond memories of a bygone era

The Cooper Penrose exhibition includes an extraordinary collection paintings, porcelain and furniture lovingly collected over a lifetime, writes MARY LELAND

'I HAVE AMUSED myself drawing, and have made an excellent likeness of you, my dear Bessey, which is most precious to me. It is drawn in a turban and the dress also like." That turban and that dress were worn by Elizabeth Penrose of Woodhill in Cork city in the portrait to be seen in the Cooper Penrose exhibition at the Crawford Gallery. The dramatic fancy dress costume was remembered by Sarah Curran who, writing as the wife of Captain Henry Sturgeon en route to his posting in Sicily, was briefly becalmed in Tangier Bay in October, 1806.

Nothing remains now of Woodhill, a mansion on the steep hillside above the River Lee and close to the suburb of Montenotte. Originally the home of Elizabeth Dennis, it was transformed when she married the Waterford timber merchant Cooper Penrose, whose uncle John founded the Waterford Glass factory. Benevolent and cultured Quakers (a little too cultured in fact; later Cooper would be "read out of meeting" by the Cork community for his sheepskin gaiters, his yachts and four-horse carriages and for his selection of unsuitable paintings) the couple had two sons James and William Edward and two daughters, Elizabeth and Anne.

The grounds at Woodhill provided space for commercial storage and landing stages at the riverside; to this day, sea-going traffic berths at Penrose Quay. The south-facing parkland around the house had gardens, walks, shrubberies and paths interrupted at intervals by statues and bronze busts, while the house itself was extended to include an arcaded gallery designed to display Cooper's acquisitions.

"The wealth and acumen that made Woodhill House so extraordinary had been built up since the late 17th century," writes Crawford director Peter Murray in his essay on the patronage of Cooper Penrose for the Irish Arts Review (Autumn 2006). "The family's factories supplied cut-glass chandeliers for drawing room and ballroom, while tradition recalls Italian stuccodores decorating the ceilings." Under these gilded ceilings, Sarah Curran, penniless and evicted after the scandal of her relationship with Robert Emmet was revealed to her outraged father, was to find shelter, friendship and a loving marriage.

Describing the gale "our poor little ship" had survived on its journey to Messina, she reminds the Penrose girls that "then I saw such seas as your brother Edward described to me at the window of Woodhill when I was pitying a little boat which was labouring in the river." Her letters to Elizabeth and Anne have been collected in The Voice of Sarah Curran, edited by John Brophy in 1955, and reveal her as a gifted comic writer, especially when she describes dinner in a storm-tossed vessel with the goose nailed to the floor and herself lashed to her husband by his sash; or the episode when "an entire family of mice" made its escape from her harp as she began to play for the assembled - and very critical - audience at Messina.

In some respects, the letters might have been written by Patrick O'Brian, so full are they of frigates and brigs and jolly boats; in another way, they suggest Jane Austen at her flightiest, requesting gossip, shipments of shoes, assurances of remembrances and news of mutual friends such as the Wilmots of Glanmire, or Lady Mountcashell of Moore Park. She continues to match-make for Elizabeth (who, like her sister Anne, never married), and begs: "Pray let me know the fashions. In what corner of the world can one be squeezed where a woman forgets them?' The letters also indicate her secure and oddly compassionate love for her husband - oddly, given that Sarah Curran herself is, probably thanks to the inaccurate romanticism of her friend Thomas Moore, widely regarded as a subject of national pity. Here she is sometimes ebullient, wittily self-deprecating, but also well-read and increasingly, reflectively wise. Because the Penrose sisters are slow to respond to her letters, she writes eventually with a kind of bitter energy: they had found her, she says, laid low by a cruel storm, and they raised her head and gave her comfort.

Young as she was, Sarah Curran had had her experience of violent griefs, first with her mother's desertion of the family home, then through her father's parsimony and domestic tyranny, then - although she does not refer to this - through the terrors of Emmet's rebellion and its ghastly aftermath. Now she is beginning to feel herself abandoned by her dear friends at Woodhill House to whom she writes after the fearsome, premature and unassisted birth of her son Johnny during a storm at sea on December 26th 1807. She begs Anne, who is diverted by the company of a Miss Elliston in Lincoln, to travel to meet her and "your little Godson" in England, but three days later, writes again: "My darling child is lying dead." In this letter, her major concern is for her husband - "think what he is suffering beside my grief and for my sake come and help to console him." The overwhelming pathos of this letter drew at last a reply from Anne but no visit, and by March, and suffering with a racking cough, Sarah has hardened. "The change in my mind is too obvious to be overlooked. The instances are too various for me now to detail in which we . . . have had reason to see the hollowness of human friendships and human promises . . . those who live at ease surrounded by kind friends and every comfort know not what it is those wretches tossed about the world as I have been suffer in mind and body. No wonder one is altered."

Sarah Curran never saw the Penroses, or Woodhill House, again. Aged 26, she died five weeks later on May 3rd 1808; Henry Sturgeon was killed in the Peninsular War in 1813. And the house, which had been the brief centrepiece of these two loving lives, was stripped of its fittings, fireplaces and movable decorations after it was sold in 1930 when Joscelyn Dennis Penrose left Woodhill. Then, in an act of cultural vandalism which Cork has never either explained or apologised for, its galleried ruins were demolished in the late 1980s to make way for a large modern red-brick dwelling.

Despite the tragic romanticism of the Sarah Curran connection, it is unjust to Cooper Penrose to consider his house only in terms of that link. For here he amassed a collection of Irish, English and Dutch paintings, Italian sculptures and several works by James Barry (his Venus Rising from the Sea may have outraged the Quakers), Angelica Kaufman, Francois Boucher, Nathaniel Grogan and pictures either by or attributed to Murillo and Guido Reni, as well as his own portrait painted in France by Jacques Louis David in 1802.

According to Peter Murray, only a handful of these pictures made their way into public collections in Ireland, "a small legacy of a house described by William West in 1810 as the 'Irish Vatican'". While one Barry painting is in the Crawford, and his Venus is in the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin, the David portrait is in the Timken Museum in San Diego. It was while researching the fate and whereabouts of the Penrose collection that Murray, assisted by both the Knight of Glin and Charles Noble, Keeper of the Collections at Chatsworth, tracked down the Penrose descendants in Derbyshire. There he met the modern Anne Penrose and her family, saw what they had retained from Woodhill, and discussed with them the possible purchase of those items by a donor, who would then avail of the tax relief provisions in Ireland to donate them to the Crawford Gallery.

The purchase was made by John and Helena Mooney of Dublin, advised by the property developer Tom McCarthy, a member of the National Heritage Trust and donor of the Richard Wood collection to Fota House. The pieces include a selection of paintings, Chinese porcelain jars shipped to Cork by vessels in the East India Trading Company line, some fine Irish furniture, utensils of Cork and Limerick silver, an engraved telescope through which Sarah Curran may have viewed life on the river with its labouring boats, and shelves of books including a copy of Plutarch's Lives.

Anne Penrose died in 1827. Bessie lived on to 1862 and died at the apartment converted from the once thronged galleries at Woodhill. By then, they had been emptied of all that Sarah Curran recalled as she walked among the antiquities of Sicily, relishing the excavated vases, coins and statuary: "I wish some good friend would make me a present of £200 with which I would furnish one of your father's new rooms."