Digging deep: William Laffan praises an absorbing study of a group of eighteenth-century Irish landscape gardens that illuminatingly unravels their many meanings

Apollo, Sept, 2005 by William Laffan

An incidental offshoot of O'Kane's researches is the light it sheds on the eighteenth-century school of Irish landscape painting. Demesne landscapes were knowingly created on the model of paintings by artists such as Claude and then themselves portrayed by Irish artists, including George Barret and Thomas Roberts. This mediation of the classical tradition though actual Irish landscapes, rather than merely through engravings, paradoxically brings these artists closer to a first-hand appreciation of their great seventeenth-century precursors. This helps explain the distinctive (but still little known) achievements of Irish landscape painters, who provide many of the well-chosen illustrations that greatly enliven the text. The discussion of Carton, for example, comes to life as the reader follows the author round the grounds, consulting an aerial photograph, estate maps of different dates and paintings by Roberts and William Ashford from about 1770, which show the development of the estate from the formality depicted in the panoramic oil by William (not Johann as in the caption) van der Hagen of thirty years earlier.

One potential difficulty arises from O'Kane's microscopic analysis, which limits itself to a handful of estates near Dublin. How typical were the gardens created by such remarkable and wealthy figures as the Conollys and FitzGeralds of the landscaping of the more than 1,000 enclosed demesnes created in Ireland from the seventeenth century on? There is a danger of generalising from a tiny elite within an elite--particularly as the correspondence of the families she discusses has survived to an unusually ample degree, making it possible to reconstruct the motives behind their gardens. The title of the book certainly suggests a wider investigation of Irish landscape design than is actually delivered and it may usefully be read in conjunction with the chapter on the subject in Toby Barnard's groundbreaking study Making the Grand Figure, Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641-1770 (2004), which approaches the subject from broader perspectives, geographical and chronological.

However, estates such as Castletown and Carton are of such importance to an understanding of Georgian Ireland (as was, indeed, realised at the time) that the narrow focus is in fact an advantage and it is O'Kane's achievement not to generalise from the case studies she selects, instead offering a model of lucid analysis, scrupulously grounded in primary source material that will provide a template for future researches into the landscapes of other Irish estates.

In a closely argued epilogue O'Kane turns to the current state of several of the landscapes whose histories she has explored, and, more generally, the public and private use of the Irish landscape today. For much of the twentieth century the great estates in Ireland were perceived as vestiges of foreign occupation and, as such, were at best ignored, at worse wilfully destroyed in a way unthinkable for comparable national examples such as Het Loo, Potsdam or Monticello. In a provocative paradox, O'Kane links this attitude to the underlying Whig moralising of landscape that saw their creation. 'The collective Irish mentality which is unable to divorce the interpretation, understanding and appreciation of historic landscapes from a moral judgement placed upon those who created them, is an ironic inheritance from the narrative of improvement these gardens explored.'