Sir, – It is ironic now that the nation has chosen Frederic William Burton’s The Meeting on the Turret Stairs as its favourite Irish painting, that the house most closely associated with its inspiration and preservation should be threatened with destruction.
We, the undersigned, wish to voice our objection to the proposed demolition of the house known as Carraig Breac in Howth, Co Dublin (for which there is currently a planning application lodged with Fingal County Council).
Carraig Breac was the country residence and later permanent home of the Dublin Stokes family from the 1840s.
Dr William Stokes, the eminent medical doctor, was father to the Celtic scholar and philologist Whitley Stokes, and the archaeologist and art historian Margaret Stokes, who were responsible for the preservation of much of Ireland’s literary and artistic heritage.
Dr Stokes was a president of the Royal Irish Academy and deeply involved with the activities of his friends George Petrie and Frederic William Burton, who did so much to record and preserve important features of Irish life in the 19th century.
In 1859, Dr Stokes commissioned the Irish architect Benjamin Woodward to design some new additions for the main house and the gate lodge at Carraig Breac in the Gothic Revival style. Woodward considered these designs among his finest.
It was Dr Stokes’s son, Whitley, who provided the translation of the Danish Ballad Hellalyle and Hildebrand that provided the inspiration for Burton’s famous painting.
However, it was his daughter, Margaret, who saved the painting and bequeathed it to the Irish nation in 1900.
There are two potential disasters to be averted: the destruction of the legacy of one of Ireland’s finest 19th-century architects; and the erasure of the memory of the Stokes family, which was so crucial to the creation and preservation of the nation’s favourite painting. – Yours, etc,