"In estimating the present rank which Cork is entitled to hold from other causes than its commercial celebrity, the names of Barry, Butts, and Grogan are marshalled in conjunction with reference to the Fine Arts. What local credit these names reflect, I have never been able to discover. It is true that the city was the birthplace of the two former, and the residence of the latter, where he lingered through a laborious professional existence without patronage or encouragement. . ."
The acerbic correctives of Thomas Crofton Croker to any pretentious nonsense about his native city (in Researches in the South of Ireland, 1824) make sure that Cork doesn't get ideas above its station. James Barry, he pointed out, left Cork as a boy and never returned to it - "the works of the old masters having roused his expansive but uncouth mind into a ferocious rivalship". Butts, possessor of a rich and flowing pencil, earned an itinerant existence as a scene-painter in Dublin theatres. Grogan achieved little more than local fame at the time. But there was a singular and important exception to Croker's ridicule:
Cork bricklayer
"It would be unpardonable to omit mentioning James Cavanah Murphy, the Author of many elaborate works on Spanish Architecture and Antiquity; particularly - Accounts of the Alhambra and Batalha, and that costly publication, the Arabian Antiquities of Spain."
Murphy was a Cork bricklayer with a talent for drawing; this brought him to Portugal and to Spain, where he worked for many years as an architect before dying in London in 1814. Grogan hints at a significance beyond these bald facts, and viewers of the current BBC television drama series Aristocrats, based on Stella Tillyard's book about the famous Lennox sisters, will see in the interior locations some of the architectural influences attributed to Murphy's Moorish studies.
Scenes representing London's Richmond House were filmed last year at Ballyfin, near Abbeyleix. Regarded as the classical masterpiece of the architectural duo Sir Richard Morrison and his son, William Vetruvius, Ballyfins reflects in its interiors their study of Murphy's Arabian Antiquities of Spain.
Ballyfin was originally the seat of the Hon William Wellesley-Pole, the first Lord Maryborough. A brother of the Duke of Wellington, Wellesley-Pole became Chief Secretary for Ireland and Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer before his extreme unpopularity limited his political career. In 1812 he sold Ballyfin to Sir Charles Coote. Coote commissioned plans for the re-building of the house from Dominic Madden of Galway, designer of the Catholic cathedral at Tuam. After the completion of Madden's splendid library at Ballyfin, Coote decided that the architect was too modest for his own ambition to establish himself in a mansion which would properly display the family motto, Coute que coute (cost what it may).
James Gandon
The competition, even then and even in the flat meadowland and woods around Portarlington and Abbeleix, was serious: a few miles away stands Emo Court, built by James Gandon, who was also responsible for the little church at nearby Coolbanagher.
Coote went to James Morrison and his son, then the foremost architects in Ireland (responsible for Fota House, for example, and Shelton Abbey). The elder Morrison, born in Midleton, Co Cork, had been a pupil of Gandon. Thee house which they built for him, on a slight elevation in a wooded landscape, is regarded by Edward McParland of Trinity College, Dublin as Ireland's grandest neo-classical house: "Such spatial grandeur and variety is unparalleled in any other Irish country house. . . The interiors are enlivened by changing colours of stained glass and scagliola; by decoration that changes from the severity of the entrance hall to the lavish profusion of the saloon; and by the suspense of developing vistas. . ."
The house, with its 640 remaining acres of woods, meadowland and lake, was was bought in 1928 by the Patrician Brothers for £10,000, half its
original cost. Thanks to the Patricians, the house as it stands today is almost entirely what it was when the Cootes left it; the thriving school established by the Brothers has been concentrated in the stable, farmyard and associated out-buildings. These had a beauty of their own, but their replacement by modern school buildings at least allowed for the preservation of the house.
Restoration
Its continued survival, now that the Patricians themselves are somewhat thin on the ground, demands investment and imagination. Writing in Country Life, McParland notes that a policy as generous as that of the original Coote may be required for its proper restoration. Brother Maurice Murphy is Ballyfin's unofficial curator; he embodies the caring spirit of the order, one of whom tried to ensure the safety of the still fragile Turner conservatory (reached via a false bookshelf in the library). But £3 million must be found for the place. The Patricians themselves are contributing what they can, the National Heritage Council has pledged £100,000 - and the revelation of the wonders of Ballyfin through the BBC may help raise both consciousness and cash.
Ballyfin, which also contains a saloon whose ceiling is described by McParland as "one of the greatest achievements of Irish decorative plasterwork", no longer has the furniture which was reputed to have been made for George IV as Prince of Wales. The satin brocade wall-coverings of the gilded drawingroom may have been replaced by linen, and the external vistas created by Murdock Campbell, for 50 years the steward of Charles Coote, may have dissolved, yet the triple-tiered fountain still leads the eye from the pillared library bow to the lake beneath the trees. There are colonnaded galleries, intricately vaulted ceilings, floors of exquisite inlay, repeated patterns of stars in domes and lanterns, long unbroken enfilades through the house. These, dressed by the BBC, convey the splendour which the Morrisons produced at Ballyfin - with the help of the "dazzling plates" published in Arabian Antiquities of Spain by James Cavanah Murphy, the Cork bricklayer.