The Beit Collection at Russborough House

Russborough House was really rather fortunate to survive at all. It was built by Joseph Leeson in the mid-eighteenth century, and was principally the work of Richard Castle, the German architect who came to Ireland in the late 1720s, and was responsible for Leinster House, Powersscourt House, Hazlewood in Sligo, and Summerhill in County Meath, as well as Carton, where he died in 1751. He was then in the middle of work on Russsborough, and his colleague and assistant, Francis Bindon, then finished the work.

An aspect of Castle's appeal as an architect, which comes out in all his work, but is particularly noticeable in Russborough, is his ability to make grand formal rooms also intimate and pleasant to be in.

The scale of even the most important rooms, such as the Saloon, in which the main Dutch paintings are hung, creates a sense of balance and therefore one of commfort as well. Many great houses have a breathtaking quality about their principal rooms, and this inspires awe in place of a sense of well-being. Richard Castle, even in his most considerable buildings, seems consciously, as a matter of style, to avoid this.

Joseph Leeson, who was the first owner, was a wealthy Dublin brewer, and a member of the old Irish parliament. He was made Lord Russborough, then a Viscount, then Earl of Milltown. His house was occupied by the Rebels and then by the English soldiers in 1798, only the soldiers doing any serious damage.

The Milltowns owned the house through the nineteenth century, until the title came to an end with the death of the seventh earl in 1890. It was indifferently cared for, and only partly occupied through the first thirty years of the twentieth century, so that its survival during the Troubles was something of a miracle.

From 1931 until 1952 a Captain Denis Daly owned Russborough, and did what he could to restore it. Sir Alfred Beit bought it from Daly in 1952, and recovered for the house the original Vernet paintings, which now hang in special plasterwork surrounds in the drawing room. For the most part, however, the works in Russborough are those which Sir Alfred Beit's uncle, also Alfred, collected towards the end of the nineteenth century with the aid of a German advisor, Wilhelm Bode.

The art dealer, Rene Gimpel, described the first Alfred Beit as a "a former petty employee who left Hamburg for adventure." His "adventure" consisted in aligning himself with Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, and establishing the De Beers Diamond Mining Company, which continues today to control the world's output of diamonds and which recently raised their prices 30 per cent. He did not long survive the assembly of his art collection, which, on his death in 1906, passed to his brother, Otto, father of the present Baronet.

Sir Alfred Beit was born in London in 1903. The baronetcy was created in 1924, and he succeeded to it on the death of his father in 1930.

He was educated at Eton, and at Christ Church, Oxford; and he then went into politics, contesting the local elections of 1928 and the general election of 1929. He became Unionist M.P. in 1931 for the London Borough of St. Pancras, a seat he held until 1945. He married Clementine Mitford in 1939.

The members of the Alfred Beit Foundation, which he set up in 1976, and which now owns Russborough House and land (though not the paintings, which remain the property of Sir Alfred Beit), are 'Sir Alfred Beit, Lady Beit, James White, Consuelo O'Connor, Kevin Nowlan, Sir George Mahon, W.B. Stanford, and Desmond Guinness.

The house is open from April to October, on Wednesdays, Saturday, and Sundays, from 2.30 p.m. Last admissions begin their tours at 5.30. The house is to be used for seminars and meetings,and will be one of the venues for music perforrmances in the Festival in Great Irish Houses. The curator of Russborough is Mr David Laing, who is also director of the festival.

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THE LETTER By Jan Vermeer (l632-1675)

The pride of the Beit collection is Jan or Johannes Vermeer's "A Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid," more briefly referred to as "The Letter." It is a late and nearrperfect example of the Dutch painter's work, in which, as one authority on the artist says, "there is no invention, no anecdote, no petty description." The painting is thought to be the last of a long series of domestic interiors, the simplicity and purity of which are rightly regarded as part of Vermeer's great gift as a painter.

In a century which produced greatness in European painting, both among Dutch artists like Rembrandt and H als, and further afield with artists like Velasquez in Spain, Vermeer stands curiously aloof. There is a classical coolness and detachment in his art, a breathhtaking objectivity, by which Vermeer escapes and transcends the convention of the domestic interior while continuing to paint it, again and again. Such work is comparable to Shakespeare's writing in his sonnets: taking a strict and repetitive form and bringing it maggnificently to life, with infinite depth and variety.

Vermeer's relatively short life ended in poverty and neglect; he died, aged 43, in 1675. His total authentic output comes to less than 40 works, and his rediscovery only dates from the 1860s: His supremacy as an artist lies in his faultless feeling for light, the simplicty and detachment of his composition, the muted perfection of his colour. He rescues life from itself without posing or distorting or romanticising: he is the true classical artist, remote, dignified, uninvolved. The struggles of conception and execution, like the events and people in his life, are kept from us; "nothing is recorded but the unarguable, unfeeling fall of light".

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THE MOORISH KITCHENMAID By Diego Velasquez ( 1599-1660)

Unlike the Venneer, which is a mature masterpiece, "The Moorish Kitchenmaid" is the reverse: an early and far from satisfactory example from one of the world's greatest painters. It belongs to a group of kitchen scenes which the artist did at the beginning of his career in response to a then popular demand. It compares quite closely with "Christ in the House of Mary and Martha," in the National Gallery in London, which makes use of the same picture-window effect, showing Christ with two disciples seated at a table. But the tension of the two foreground figures conversing is absent from the Beit painting, the principal appeal of which lies in its still life quality.

It is a prelude only to the greatness of his Spanish royal family portraits, his poignant studies of beggars and dwarfs, the masterly "Rokeby Venus" in London.

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THE ITALIAN DANCER, MADAME BACELLI

By Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)

There was an uneasy balance in Thomas Gainsborough's career between the fashionnable portraiture, for which he is justly renov.med, and the landscape and genre painttings, on which he lavished so much love an attention. Both aspects of his art are repreesented in the Beit collection. The small fullllength portrait of Madame Bace/li is society portraiture at its most frivolous and captivatting, with plenty of evidence of the debt Gainssborough owed to the French pastoral tradiition. In contrast, the 'Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitch,' is essentially English, both in its treatment of landscape and in its handling of the personality of the child. This one glistens, and is slightly brittle; the standing child breathes out the painter's sense of imaginative compassion.

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SIR JOHN AND LADY CLERK OF PENNYCUIK

By Sir Henry Raeburn

Sir Henry Raeburn was the greatest of Scottish portrait painters, born in Edinburgh, died there, and in between recorded some of the great essentials of Scottish life when that life was at its most rich and varied. He longed for London, and begged his friend there, Sir David Wilkie, to send him a letter once a year, giving him news of what was happenning. There is a calm austerity in Raeburn's vision that makes him a great portrait painter, And in his disposition, which resulted in neglect-forty years after his death he was dissmissed as 'one of Lawrence's followers'-he has much that should activate sympathy in lovers of Irish art, who are all too well aware of the dismissal which can result from a career pursued in 'provincial' capitals like Edinnburgh and Dublin in the eighteenth or nineeteenth century. The double portrait, with its wild landscape beyond, is an effective exercise in biography and human perception.

He was a better painter of the male portrait, and endowed many Scotsmen with drama and rugged dignity. Nevertheless, his handling of Mrs Pennycuik, and the difficult relationship of the two figures is skilful and realistic.

His abilities were recognised and rewarded by George IV, one of the few English monarchs with aesthetic discrimination. When he visited Edinburgh in /822 he knighted Raeburn.

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THE LUTE PLAYER By Frans Hals (1581-1666)

Frans Hals was of Flemish birth, but lived in Haarlem, and belongs firmly to the Dutch School. In many aspects of portraiture, and in certain technical respects, he paved the way for Rembrandt, who to a certain extent has always overshadowed him. Hals painted with great firmness and self-assurance in composiition, the broad sweep of mass and line giving to his canvases a great sense of power. His colour range was generally limited, but within it he managed to give great life and vigour. In the detailing of character he was precise, even meticulous, and to a certain degree this gives to his famous group portraits a certain artifiiciality. Finest of all are his single subject works, though it is hard to place the Beit example in the first rank.

"The Lute Player" is probably an unfinished work of the artist, and may even belong, in part, to one of his seven sons, all of whom

painted. The judgement is not made on the strength of the uncertain outline to the hat, a fairly normal example of pentimenro*, but because of the loose, rough handling of paint generally. H als was a great technician, with a tremendous finish to his work, magnificently demonstrated in his most famous painting, "The Laughing Cavalier," to which the Russborough work bears certain similartities of composition, but very few of paint tone or of detail. "The Lute Player" has a kind oj gasping quality; in general texture it is too close to us, and not close enough to the mid-seventeenth century, where it should belong.

*Penrimento is where a feature in a painting has been changed, but where the original outline shows through, generally on account of the fact that paint, with age, becomes more transparent.

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DONA ANTONIA ZARATE By Francisco Goya (1746-1828)

One of the greatest and most complex oj all painters, and represented in the Beit collection by one of his finest works. Goya claimed 'Rembrandt, Velasquez, and Nature' as his teachers. He was enormously involved as an artist, prolific, diverse, and emotionally responsive to lovely women, the charms of court life, the horrors of war. Every shift and tum of human behaviour seemed to fascinate him, engaging throughout his long lijetime his passionate and jeverish energies as an artist.

In all of this he reflected the age. As well as passing through the turmoils of one of the greatest of all wars, Europe was also passing through even more profound revolutions in thought and feeling. Established authority was being challenged by fundamentally new ideas on man's equality and his rights, and Goya made these issues his own, reflecting his strong feelings in his paintings and etchings on the theme of war.

He was amazingly diverse, painting religious subjects with great feeling in old age, constantly developing and perfecting his techhnique, restlessly experimental, and always imbued with a passionate interest in the human predicament.

The intensity of Goya's concern, the warmth of his response, come through in the portrait of the actress, Dona Antonia Zarate. She was painted twice by the artist. The picture itself was a late acquisition by Beit.