How Irish houses looked 100 years ago

CRITICAL TEXTS by Robert O'Byrne 3: The Georgian Society RecordsPAINTINGS AND furniture cannot be properly appreciated without an understanding of the context for which they were designed and made.

This would seem a self-evident truth, and yet architecture and fine art are often studied independently of one another.

Ideally they should be examined together and yet the fractured character of Ireland's history makes this a singularly difficult task; so much relevant material was lost during the first quarter of the last century that it is hard to imagine how the interiors of our historic houses - a great many of which have been destroyed and their contents scattered - were once furnished.

One critical source for such information are the five volumes comprising the Georgian Society Records, published between 1909-1913. The short-lived Georgian Society was founded 100 years ago. As the preface to the first volume explains, it had a very specific purpose: "To inspect and note the eighteenth-century (or Georgian) architectural and decorative work which remains in Dublin, and to record such work by means of sketches, measured drawings, and photographs...".

The driving force behind the new organisation was the Rev John Pentland Mahaffy, subsequently provost of Trinity College, Dublin, who lived in a fine 18th century house, 38 North Great George's Street.

To achieve his purpose, he drew around him an impressive group of supporters and authors including Walter Strickland (discussed on this page two weeks ago) and the architects Page L Dickinson and Richard Caulfield Orpen (brother of the painter William Orpen).

As is clear from the preface, the Georgian Society's primary interest lay in 18th century architecture and in buildings found within the centre of Dublin but it soon began to extend beyond these rather artificial boundaries.

Thus the fourth volume opens with a long essay by Mahaffy on the furnishing of Georgian houses (he had written a similar essay on Society in Georgian Dublin for Volume III) in which he draws on three inventories lent by Julian Gaisford-St Lawrence.

These detailed the furniture contents of Howth Castle in 1748, 1751 and 1753 and listed items sent to the Dublin residence of the 27th Lord Howth. Mahaffy includes the entire first inventory and correctly observes that the furniture, even for so great a member of the Irish aristocracy, "was quite simple".

The diningroom, for example, held 10 mahogany chairs and a settee, a large mirror in a gilt frame, a large carpet and not much else (although presumably there was also a dining table).

This relative spareness in decoration appears to have remained the fashion in many Irish houses over the following 150 years, not least because after the Act of Union in 1801 there was not a lot of money to spend on buying new furniture. Where complete rooms feature among the photographs of the Georgian Society Records, with few exceptions they tend to hold only a small quantity of furniture, often pushed back against the walls as had been the style in the first half of the 18th century.

The second volume, for example, features images of the interior of Ely House when it was still a private home occupied by Sir William Thornley Stoker (brother of author Bram Stoker) with pictures hung low on the lofty drawingroom walls and a diningroom sideboard featuring a splendid display of old silver.

In this respect, the illustrations are an invaluable resource since they provide us today with an idea of how Irish houses were furnished before the social and political turmoil that would follow from 1916 onwards.

And a large number of those places have vanished altogether, such as Drogheda House, which stood on the upper eastern side of O'Connell Street until lost in the Easter Rising; with a frontage extending 66ft, it contained wonderfully pretty rococo stuccowork reproduced in a series of photographs in the society's third volume.

Likewise the staircase and interiors of Antrim House (now the site of the National Maternity Hospital) can be seen thanks to the foresight of the Georgian Society, as well as the terrace of houses on Upper Merrion Street just before this was cleared away for the construction of what is now Government Buildings.

The final volume of the series is especially interesting, since it features houses outside Dublin some of which, such as Summerhill, Co Meath, no longer exist while others have changed hands and therefore no longer contain their original furnishings.

Here are photographs of Castletown and Carton when they were still owned by members of the Conolly and FitzGerald families, the rooms richly filled with furniture and paintings which had been in place from the 18th century but have since been largely dispersed.

It all makes for fascinating, if somewhat melancholy, viewing. Volume V contains a county-by-county listing of Georgian houses with the names of their original and present owners and some information on their architecture. It is by no means complete but still important.

Other publications have since complemented the Georgian Society's work as a source of information on how old Irish houses were once furnished. Ten years ago, Country Life published a book on Irish houses and gardens drawing on its own inestimable archives. Among the earliest photographs included are those showing Lambay and Howth Castle not long after Edwin Lutyens had worked on both properties; happily in each case their interiors have scarcely changed in the interim.

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about other houses covered, such as Heywood, Co Laois which was destroyed by fire in 1950 and Powerscourt which suffered the same fate in 1974.

Also worth noting is a book published in 2002, Randal MacDonnell's The Lost Houses of Ireland although the title is something of a misnomer since the majority of properties included survive to this day, even if not all of them are in the same private hands. Once more, the pictures, taken for the Irish Tatler and Sketch between 1947 and 1961, are of particular interest and again show furnishings since lost from the likes of Rockingham, Co Roscommon (another victim of fire in 1957) and Killeen Castle, Co Meath (burnt out by arsonists in 1981).

Both this book and that produced by Country Life remain easy to find but the same is not the case for the Georgian Society Records. Once the fifth volume appeared in 1913, the organisation responsible was dissolved (happily to be succeeded by the still-extant Irish Georgian Society in 1958).

Only 300 copies of the first volume were printed, but this number had risen to 600 by the time the last one came out. Nevertheless, especially as complete sets they soon became exceedingly rare and therefore in 1969 a second edition was published by the Irish University Press with an introduction by the Hon Desmond Guinness.

This in turn is now highly prized - and priced - and it is surely time some enterprising publisher thought to issue the five volumes again. As a record of how Irish houses looked a century ago, the Georgian Society Records are invaluable.

•Georgian Society to Irish Georgian Society 1908-2008, an exhibition of photographs, can be seen at the Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, Dublin from now until September 5th.

Featuring images of Irish buildings and their interiors from the past century, the exhibition includes images taken for the original Georgian Society from 1908 onwards. When the Irish Architectural Archive was founded, one of its first purchases was the Irish Georgian Society's own extensive collection of photographs which included a number of items from the earlier organisation. The exhibition may be seen Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 5pm and admission is free.