The Glories of Ireland eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 452 pages of information about The Glories of Ireland.

The Glories of Ireland eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 452 pages of information about The Glories of Ireland.
outlasted the remembrance of the persons whose likenesses they sought to reproduce.  Separate monographs might be justifiably written on most of the gifted artists here enumerated, and one can only regret not being able in short space to compare and estimate their various qualities.  Thomas Chambers, A.R.A. (1724?-1784), William Nelson Gardiner (1766-1814), James Egan (1799-1842), and William Humphreys (1794-1865) are other Irish engravers who cannot be overlooked in a survey of the art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Contemporaneously with the remarkable development of the art of engraving arose a group of Irish architects.  Rather earlier in point of time was Sir Edward Lovat Pearce (d. 1733), who was one of the chief architects of the Irish Parliament House, and Thomas Burgh (d. 1730), to whom we owe the Library of Trinity College, Dublin; but Thomas Cooley (1740-1784), designer of the handsome Royal Exchange of that city; Richard Castle (d. 1751), a foreigner who settled in Ireland and built a number of beautiful Irish residences; Francis Johnston (1761-1829), an excellent architect whose chief claim to remembrance, however, is as founder of the Royal Hibernian Academy; and, above all, James Gandon (1743-1823), whose superb Custom House, Four Courts, and part of the Irish Parliament House will perpetuate his name in Dublin while that city lasts—­each helped to make the capital, even in its decay, one of the most interesting in Europe.  Nor should we forget Thomas Ivory (d. 1786), whose Foundling Hospital is another of Dublin’s many graceful edifices; nor Sir Richard Morrison (1767-1849) and his son William (1794-1838), much of whose work remains to testify to their skill and ingenuity.

Ecclesiastical architecture in Ireland is indebted to Patrick Byrne (fl. 1840), James J. McCarthy (d. 1882), J.B.  Keane (d. 1859), and James Murray (1831-1863), for many well designed churches and chapels throughout Ireland; but the great names in modern Irish architecture are those of Benjamin Woodward (1815-1861), whose premature death was a serious loss to Irish art; Sir Thomas Deane (1792-1871); and his son, Sir Thomas Newenham Deane (1828-1899).  The elder Deane was, with Woodward, the architect of the Oxford Museum and of the splendid Engineering Hall of Trinity College, Dublin, buildings which have elicited enthusiastic praise from John Ruskin and other eminent critics.  Deserving of respectful mention, too, to come down to our own days, are Sir Thomas Drew (1838-1910) and William H. Lynn, who is still living.

In sculpture, again, Ireland has done memorable work.  In the eighteenth century she gave us admirable craftsmen like Edward Smyth (1749-1812), John Hickey (1756-1795), and Christopher Hewitson (fl. 1772-1794), whose dignified monument of Bishop Baldwin is one of the most distinguished pieces of sculpture in Trinity College, Dublin.  But it was not till the appearance of a later group of sculptors, including John Hogan (1800-1858), John

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The Glories of Ireland from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.