A column in Birr and an album of eccentric designs is the legacy of Samuel Chearnley. But who was he, asks Eileen Battersby.
Imagination, a vivid grasp of the fantastical and much grotesque humour shape the contents of an album of 18th-century architectural drawings that has waited some 260 years for publication. The works survived the ravages of time as well as the disastrous accidental fire that inflicted smoke, water and related wet-plaster damage to the library and hall of Birr Castle, Co Offaly in 1922, when a cigarette was innocently tossed into a turf basket and many valuable books were lost.
Aside from minor water damage to several of the 84 black pen-and-ink drawings, neglect was to be the worst injury suffered by Miscelanea Structura Curiosa as it lay forgotten, sharing a similar fate to its doomed creator, architect Samuel Chearnley.
Born into a minor Co Tipperary gentry family in or about 1717, he died in Birr at the age of 29 in 1747. Little is known about him; not even the cause of death. His grave is unknown, although he was the younger brother of topographical artist Anthony Chearnley, circa 1715-1786, about whom multidisciplinary art historian Peter Harbison has been researching.
Only one of Samuel Chearnley's designs has ever been built. It is, however, one that all who visit the town of Birr will have seen.
It is the Doric column, initially built in 1747 - the year of Chearnley's premature death - in honour of the Duke of Cumberland. Noticable since 1915 for the column's lack of a statue, it dominates the central square of this well-planned Georgian town, home since the 17th century to the Parsons family, the earls of Rosse.
Yet if the eccentric, darkly playful designs with their grotesque flourishes and strange creatures, set amid grottos and ruins, obelisks, waterfalls, unbuildable bridges and obscene fountains, appear to belong to the surreal world of Mervyn Peake's 1930s The Gormenghast Trilogy, Chearnley's Georgian opus, Miscelanea Structura Curiosa constitutes one of the earliest surviving works of Irish architectural design and is the first book devoted to garden buildings undertaken in 18th- century Europe.
Its welcome publication by Churchill House Press, a small imprint concentrating on Georgian architectural titles, in a handsome large-scale format edited by art historian William Laffan and accompanied with essays by historians Christine Casey and Toby Barnard, and a chronological catalogue of the works of Anthony Chearnley, compiled by Prof Harbison, marks the meeting of scholarship and social history.
The drawings also provide some insight into the 18th-century Irish mind, caught as it often was between public loyalty to the crown and personal inclinations of unfettered subversion.
Politics plays no part in the drawings: even the formal buildings such as the elaborate farmers' houses and court buildings which would never have been built in the Irish midlands, look to Palladian villas and central European palaces, yet the one public statement in stone is the column.
"The decision to honour Cumberland," writes William Laffan, "had very specific political resonance. His statue dominated the square which bore his name, a proud symbol of Protestant authority through the triumph of the House of Hanover."
Son of King George II, the Duke of Cumberland had defeated the Jacobite cause at Culloden, and had acquired a polarising sectarian significance. Devoid of the fantastical element that marks the designs in the album, the column, with or without a statue, appears curiously prosaic.
The standing figure of Lord Cumberland, which was about 10 feet in height, was removed in 1915 in deference to the wounded sensitivities of Scottish Highland troops billeted nearby. "Cumberland thus" writes Laffan, "became one of the first imperial statutes to be removed in Ireland many years before Nelson was less ceremoniously toppled." Meanwhile Lord Cumberland's stone head continues to reside at Birr Castle.
Gardens were intended as the formal setting for many of Chearnley's designs. This is not surprising as gardens were in many ways the theatre of the 18th century as the wealthy debated the merits of either "creating" natural parkland or choosing an ordered paradise of geometrical perfection. It was, of course, possible to have both.
Chearnley's designs, the result of close collaboration with Sir Laurence Parsons, his distant cousin, are fantastical rather than formal. None were ever built at Birr - presumably due to straitened finances. When the family's fortunes improved in the 19th century, the money was spent on scientific and horticultural projects, not whimsy.
History has recorded little about either man. Although there were social differences - one an aristocrat, the other hailing from gentry stock - it seems likely that they were kindred spirits. Several of the drawings must have come about through a shared sense of fun. The nature of the volume is that of a miscellany. The eye immediately goes to the more comic or grotesque entries such as the famous vomiting and urinating fountain (plate 22). It looks more likely to be found in Baroque Rome than Co Offaly.
According to Laffan, "The interesting thing to say about it is that its ribald humour made it unlikely to be built, remaining instead hidden within the covers of the album". Pointing to the darker historical significance of one of the grottos (plate 6) which appears to be a sexual initiation building of sorts, Laffan says: "It appears to be a structure associated with the rites of the Irish Hell Fire Club founded a few years earlier by Sir Laurence Parson's cousin, Richard, the First Earl of Rosse" and adds that it could also be the entrance of a ghost train.
In another sequence, entitled "Surprises" by Chearnley's own pen, a series of little grottos (plates 11 and 12) each contain a deliberately ambiguous figure. "Are they," asks Laffan, "sculpture or living creatures?" even the bust in the second grotto appears to be alive. The fifth clearly resembles a caricature leprechaun. Elsewhere, a fountain (plate 16) is topped by three alligator-like reptiles. Is the middle one howling at the moon in pain, or is it merely laughing? The comedy moves ever closer to terror, perhaps this is deliberate: was he aware he was dying? Who knows?
For all the exuberance of the garden designs - which had they been built would have left a legacy of garden follies unique to Ireland, surpassing the blackness of the famous Jealous Wall at the splendid Belvedere House, just outside Mullingar - more conventional, formal building designs are also present. These include his triumphal arches and the imposing, heavily decorated Italianate mansion (plate 70), referred to by Laffan as "exercises in rational Palladianism". This belatedly celebrated volume displays abundant evidence of Chearnley's formal architectural vision, as well as his shrewd reading of the politics of his day, countered by his natural subversive flair.
Miscelanea Structura Curiosa, by Samuel Chearnley, edited by William Laffan is published by Churchill House Press, €85.
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