An Irish Arcadia brought back to life

Discovery and retrieval of grand paintings and artworks were central to Ballyfin’s recreation and give visitors the exclusive experience of a grand country estate

THE ART OF Ballyfin may not be just a matter of what has been hung on the walls of the grand Irish house. However unfairly, it may be instead the art of convincing critics that the meticulous restoration of this neo-classical mansion near Portlaoise as a country house hotel justifies the exclusivity implied by its charges. While the restoration project initiated 10 years ago has been expertly appraised and acclaimed and the book by Kevin V Mulligan recording the process is a triumph in itself, what has drawn some antagonistic commentary is the re-creation of such a luxurious environment in a time of austerity. What is not so readily recognised is that this decade-long collaborative venture includes not only significant employment but what amounts to a repatriation of Irish art covering several centuries.

With only 15 bedrooms in a house surrounded by 600 acres, the Ballyfin demesne is an Irish Arcadia. According to art historian William Laffan, this is what it was like to stay in a grand Irish country estate and that was always, by its nature, an exclusive experience. Laffan’s contribution to Ballyfin has been in re-furnishing its walls with the portraits, landscapes, drawings and etchings of the kind which a visitor would have expected to see in such a house. It would have been a particular kind of visitor, sensitive to such things, perhaps envious and certainly aware of competitive genealogy as expressed in family portraiture. If today’s visitors are similarly sensitive, they will find a lot to satisfy them of both ancient and modern, although the ancestral portraits may be outside their scope. Such as, for example, the enormous family scene by George Hayter of the children of Sir Charles and Lady Caroline Coote in which the pet whippet was reputedly painted by the young Sir Edwin Landseer.

At Ballyfin the paintings cover the early stages of acquisition and inheritance from the Jacobean Crosbys to their successors, the Poles, builders of the “modern house” at Ballyfin handed on to the Wellesleys. Of these, Arthur, Duke of Wellington, is the most famous, but the most important for Ballyfin was his elder brother, Richard, whose wholesale animosities forced Ballyfin’s proprietor William Wellesley to sell the house to Sir Charles Henry Coote, creator of the house and estate as they were in their prime.

Today’s authenticity supports that of the past. The hanging displays Laffan’s assertion that the Irish creative spirit is not enclosed in any one period of time. So Brian Maguire, Hughie O’Donoghue, Michael Farrell, William Crozier, Nick Miller, Dorothy Cross, Louis le Broquey, Eoin McHugh, and drawings by Nesta FitzGerald are all ranged with Irish delft, glass and furniture, and the hanging, for example, of a portrait from 1640.

Retrieval and discovery have been part of the Ballyfin commitment for Laffan and the team gathered by the project’s originators Fred and Kay Krehbiel and led by Jim Reynolds: one recovery is a stunning portrait by Hoppner of Sir Charles Henry Coote as a boy, de-acquisitioned by an American museum to which it had been sold by Sir Hugh Lane and restored to Ballyfin after “an exciting moment” at Christies.

Other pictures include references to the architectural fashions of the time in which they were painted and which are also repeated in the building, a house so famous for its lavish interiors that the hanging schemes had to adapt not only to its decorative principles but also its scale. Despite this however it is in some of the smaller rooms that the most delightful pictures are to be found: John Ryan’s 1780s portrait of the Catholic bishop of Kilfenora is in a bedroom, while William John Leech’s honeymoon portrait of his wife Elizabeth is in the Little Library.

The Coote collection itself stayed intact until the purchase of the estate by the Patrician Brothers in 1930. Although there was a dispersal through various sales and auctions, after that the family portraits remained with the family, and have been returned through the simple inducement that they could be hung again at Ballyfin. Because the current baronet Sir Christopher Coote is also the family archivist, all the Coote papers, photographs, and inventories gave the project team a lot to work with. “That informed the restoration but didn’t determine it – this is not ‘the Coote experience’,” says Laffan. “It would be impossible to recreate the house as it was circa 1900 and maybe it wouldn’t be desirable either.”

Yet it must be admitted that part of the new reality of Ballyfin is the display of so much Irish art: “We bought privately, we bought at auction, we bought at galleries such as Pym’s Gallery in London, which deals with a lot of Irish painting; we dealt with the Rubicon Gallery and with Caxton’s Antiques. The fact is that a private commission on this scale and with a patron of such vision draws the best out of everyone concerned with it.”

Arts and the country house

ON THE weekend of November 11th-13th, Ballyfin is hosting a course entitled Arts and the Irish Country House.

Such houses are, it points out, a total work of art made up of architecture, landscape design, interiors and furnishings.

Lecturers include historian William Laffan, architectural historian Kevin Mulligan and garden designer Jim Reynolds.

On Saturday afternoon, guests will travel to Birr Castle for a private tour plus lunch hosted by Brendan Parsons, the Earl of Rosse.

The two-night break, including lunch and dinner, costs €975 per person, based on two sharing.

See ballyfin.com

Ballyfin: The Restoration of an Irish House and Demesne

by Kevin V Mulligan (€40).