TAOISEACH BRIAN Cowen will today unveil a significant Irish art collection, which has been donated to Fota House by the Cork-based McCarthy family.
Fota House, which was taken over by the Irish Heritage Trust in December 2007, reopened this month after extensive refurbishment work on the first floor over the winter.
The trust’s chief executive Kevin Baird said Fota House’s collection of 70 works of art would include masterpieces of the 18th-century Irish landscape school.
The highlights of the McCarthy family collection include works by Thomas Roberts, such as A Land Storm.
Works by Roberts’s teacher, George Mullins, and contemporaries Robert Carver and William Ashford are also included.
Mr Baird said the trust had been lucky to secure the collection, which was put together in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Without the intervention of the McCarthys, the collection was genuinely about to be lost,” Mr Baird said.
“It was going to go to auction in England where it would have been broken up.”
The collection will also include 50 pieces of Irish furniture.
Mr Baird said the collection would be one of the top three in Ireland of its type in public view outside of the national institutions.
Fota House was originally a modest two-storey hunting lodge belonging to the Smith-Barry family.
In the 1820s, the Irish architects Sir Richard Morrison and his son William Vitruvius Morrison were commissioned to convert the property into an elegant residence.
Many original Smith-Barry family portraits bought at auction in Christie’s of London in February of last year are now on loan to the trust.
