Celebrating an 18th century stucco master - and speculative builder

The designs by neo-Classical stuccodor Michael Stapleton are the subject of a new book and exhibition, writes Robert O'Byrne

The designs by neo-Classical stuccodor Michael Stapleton are the subject of a new book and exhibition, writes Robert O'Byrne

As a rule Irish speculative builders don't receive a favourable press, usually with good reason. But one of their number is now the subject of a book, an exhibition and a series of lectures.

Admittedly Michael Stapleton (1747-1801) was more than just a builder; he was also this country's most skilled stuccodor working in the neo-Classical or Adam style that came into fashion during the last decades of the 18th century. Heretofore Irish neo-Classical interior decoration has received less attention and admiration than the earlier, more florid, rococo form exemplified by the work of the Lafranchini brothers. But this focus on Stapleton and his career should do much to rectify that imbalance, as well as throwing light on his own extraordinary career.

A Dubliner, Stapleton was also a Catholic which, had he been less talented and ambitious, could have hindered his advancement; the Guild of St Bartholomew for Bricklayers and Plasterers, for example, automatically excluded Catholic membership. That Stapleton remained true to his faith is evidenced by a legacy in his will to the 'Roman Catholick Charity School of Liffey-street parish' as well as the fact that he won the commission to design and build the original Catholic seminary of St Patrick's College in Maynooth, Co Kildare.

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Little of Stapleton's work in Maynooth has survived, and that is also the case for many of the other properties he developed in Dublin. It seems most likely that when young he trained as a stuccodor with Robert West before beginning to pick up commissions on his own, among the earliest being those for Lucan House in Co Dublin and 5 Ely Place in the city centre. The principal reception rooms of Powerscourt House on South William Street were decorated by Stapleton in the late 1770s as was the interior of Trinity College's Exam Hall the following decade, along with some houses on St Stephen's Green and Merrion Square.

Meanwhile, parallel to these commissions, Stapleton had set himself up as a speculative builder. The 18th century is replete with craftsmen who, after working for the era's equivalent of property developers, believed they could do the job just as well.

In 1782 a carpenter called Richard Worthington opened The Builder's Evening Academy on Clarendon Street, "Where drawing in architecture is taught in all its branches, theoretical and practical, on the most easy and familiar plan." It helped that the architecture of Dublin during this period tended towards plain, even austere, facades with brick the preferred material. But just as important, the capital's expansion throughout the 18th century was heavily dependent on speculative building: landowners would lay out a square or street and then sell long leases to individual plots so that these could be developed by the purchaser. Although there were occasional requirements, such as no projecting bays permitted to the front of a house, the consistency of Dublin's Georgian architecture was more a matter of happy chance than conscious design.

Stapleton, who began his career as a plasterer, was eager to take advantage of an opportunity to develop some of those plots.

One of his first speculative builds, and the only extant example, is 9 Harcourt Street. Finished in 1785, it is a typical 18th century Dublin house, constructed of brick, three bays wide and rising four storeys over basement. The exterior was devoid of ornament other than an Ionic doorcase with fluted entablature.

Inside, however, the principal rooms are decorated with rich, albeit restrained stuccowork typical of Stapleton. And that was equally the case for other instances of his speculative building, such as two more houses on Harcourt Street and a row of three houses on the south side of Mountjoy Square that survived until the 1980s.

The buildings have gone, but what remains is Stapleton's own collection of designs for interiors, the sole surviving album of its kind from an 18th century Irish craftsman. Finely executed in ink and watercolour, the collection also includes working drawings in pencil together with related sketches and marginalia that reveal the creative process at work within Stapleton's studio. This remarkable cache of material has been held by the National Library of Ireland since 1940 and, although the subject of academic study hitherto, has not been seen by the general public.

Now Conor Lucey has both written a book on Stapleton and curated an exhibition on the stuccodor's career at the Irish Architectural Archive; appropriately enough this organisation's premises at 45 Merrion Square features decorative plasterwork attributed to Stapleton. Irish neo-Classicism, for a long time liable to being dismissed as little more than the replication of 'modish' clichés, is shown to have its own inherent merits. And, even more astonishing, for once a speculative builder is given very favourable press.

The Stapleton Collection: Designs for the Neoclassical Irish Interior, published by Churchill House Press in association with National Library of Ireland, €45.

The exhibition Decorating the Georgian Interior: Drawings from the Stapleton Collection runs at the Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, Dublin 2 from 14th March to 1st June.