Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832

by Stella Tillyard

  Waterstone was Emily’s own project. She conceived and designed it. Louisa, Cecilia and the elder Fitzgerald children helped in arranging groups of shells and rocks. Workmen from the Carton estate carried and lifted and stuck the specimens in place. But all the time they were also busy elsewhere: Waterstone was only one of many alterations carried out at Carton in the mid-1760s. Emily had to the full what Sarah called ‘the Lennox passion for improvements’ and the Duke of Leinster, in keeping with new, technocratic (and often seen as ‘Whig’) attitudes towards landscape was eager to try his hand at creating the sort of informal park that Capability Brown had made fashionable. At the beginning of the decade the Duke (then Earl of Kildare) had the park surveyed and set about redesigning it himself. Emily and he seemed to have divided up the task of alteration in the conventional manner. She, as the mistress of the house, had charge of the inside, the layout, decorative schemes and choice of furniture. He, as man of the wider world, took the park, the offices and the gardens as his domain. But this division was honoured more in the breach than the observance. While the Duke was the original designer of the park, its final shape owed a good deal to Emily’s whims and her famous lack of patience. Moreover, when in 1755 Arthur Devis painted the couple seated outdoors surveying their domain, it was Emily and not her husband who was holding the plan of the grounds.

  Before they began on outdoor work, Emily and Kildare decided to alter Carton House itself. Carton had disappointed Emily when she first arrived in Ireland as a young bride. Despite its interior magnificence it lacked grandeur on the Holland House scale. On the ground floor was a suite of state rooms and a series of smaller rooms facing the garden in which the family lived during the day; Emily’s parlour and a bedroom she sometimes used were there. The house had no basement, so the kitchens and offices were housed in two wings. The first floor was entirely taken up with family bedrooms while the attic storey housed the servants. At first Emily and Kildare considered massive alterations, including the creation of a ‘great room’. But large amounts of money had already been spent. The ceiling in the salon, where plaster putti stuck their icing-sugar legs over the cornices and wrapped their fat arms round gilded swagging, had been installed in 1739. The grand staircase, hallway and interior panelling were all complete. So they decided to redecorate, supposedly a cheap alternative to redesigning, and to concentrate their resources on bringing the park up to date.

  ‘I really think Carton House when ’tis spruced up will be vastly pretty and full as fine as I wou’d ever wish a country house to be,’ twenty-seven-year-old Emily wrote as the decorating got under way in the spring of 1759. She was full of enthusiasm for her schemes, dreaming about the magnificence of newly painted rooms hung with Chinese prints or bedrooms hung in blue paper and upholstered in silk. But she did not enjoy the process of transformation, quickly losing patience with the army of carpenters, plasterers, paper hangers and painters who swarmed about the house. ‘Here are my painters all going away and leaving the work half done, half undone. I am plagued to death with them and poisoned into the bargain. My paper man, too, has used me very ill … I am quite sick of them all,’ she complained in May 1759. Refurbishment demanded patience and persistence, neither of which were Emily’s virtues. Not only did she demand the instant realisation of her plans but she also got carried away by whims which diverted her from the management of the whole task. While the painters and stone masons were hard at work, Emily’s energies were dissipated by the search for 150 yards of taffeta and the Chinese wallpaper and prints she called ‘India paper’ and ‘Indian pictures’. ‘My dear Lord Kildare,’ she wrote, ‘don’t let Louisa forget the India paper, and if you see any you like buy it at once, for that I have will never hold out for more than three rooms, and you know we have four to do; for I have set my heart upon that which opens into the garden being done, for ’tis certainly now our best and only good living room.’ The India paper arrived, although it wasn’t enough. Emily spread it thinly, cutting out the prints and sticking them directly on to the painted walls.

  Outside, under Kildare’s punctilious direction, things progressed more smoothly. By the summer of 1761, the stream that ran between the house and the Dublin road had been dammed, dug and widened into a kidney-shaped artificial lake, with sloping banks and an island in the middle. Emily called the lake Kildare’s ‘piece of water’ and was full of praise for her husband’s ingenuity, claiming that he was the equal of the most celebrated landscape gardeners. ‘The new river is beautiful; one turn of it is a masterpiece in the art of laying out, and I defy Kent or Brown or Mr. Hamilton to excel it. This without flattery; and now that you may not feel too vain, the shape of the island in its present state is not pretty. It wants that grace and easy pretty turn that you really have without compliment given to all the rest, and in one part especially. The end is extremely well hid at present, and when the banks are dressed and green it will be altogether a most lovely thing. I had great pleasure in seeing ten men thickening up that part of the plantation between the Dublin and Nine Mile Stone Gate with good, tall showy trees – elm and ash; but there are still quantities of holes not filled, and I suspect that to satisfy our impatience last autumn Jacob Smith dug more than he will get trees to fit this winter.’ The holes were rapidly filled. Indeed too many trees were planted throughout the estate. By 1766, Kildare had pruned, clipped and trimmed to let light in to the plantations. Then Emily complained. The trees in the walks to the flower garden were now too sparse, she said. Kildare replied wearily, ‘As for the walks to the flower garden, I cannot but say they were my doing, and am concerned that my Emily dislikes them. Since she does, I can say no more, but that she may alter them if she pleases, for pleasing her is what I [would] wish to do: what I am going to say is not in the least to prevent your altering of the walks as you have my consent. But trees in a year or so would cover the walks to the flower garden in such a manner as would prevent the cold winds from blowing as you say they do, and look thick again. But then, patience is required for that.’

  Patience, in short supply at Carton, was found in abundance at Castletown. Louisa never committed any of Tom Conolly’s money to a scheme until she was absolutely sure she wanted it. Then she went about building and decorating in a steady and concentrated way, enjoying the process because she was utterly certain of its purpose.

  At the beginning there had been talk of demolition. Castletown, with its wainscoting and long gallery, its formal garden and flat park, was old fashioned. But once Louisa had put in the new staircase in 1760 she saw that the house could be at once publicly imposing and privately informal. So the original structure was reprieved and a process of decoration begun that was to last for more than twenty years. ‘I am glad you like what has been done at Castletown,’ the Duke of Leinster wrote to Emily in June 1766. ‘I told Lady Louisa that when she came to live here after the alterations were made, that she would be obliged to me for finding out that the alterations could be made without pulling down the house.’

  Castletown’s alterations were Louisa’s labour of love. As the years passed and she and Tom remained childless, Castletown absorbed some of Louisa’s spare familial feeling. She fussed, and worried over it and loved it like a member of the family. It was her creature and her creation. Away from the house she felt bereft and incomplete.

  The hall at Castletown was paved like a huge chess board in shining marble slabs of black and white. Once the staircase was in, Louisa finished off the entrance with walls of white plaster bas-relief. The Lafranchini brothers, who were responsible for a number of loaded Dublin interiors and the sugary excrescences of the Carton salon, were called in to do the plaster work. But Louisa used their modelling skills with a characteristic restraint. They created scores of shells, cornucopias, dragons and swaggings on the Castletown staircase wall, but she drew the line at fat putti with dimpled knees and acres of gold leaf. Characteristic too was Louisa’s choice of subject matter, hunting for Tom and the family for herself. Emily and her husban
d, suspended in profile in winged roundels, face each other on the staircase wall. Between them is a hunting scene of stupendous carnage, a metonym for Tom Conolly himself. The effect is monumental rather than magnificent because the great expanse of the walls is white and the strongest pattern comes from the chequered simplicity of the hall floor below. The only gold in the entrance was reflected from the regiment of brass stair-rails, which march from ground to first floor in upright regularity.

  Louisa kept the existing rooms on the ground floor: a dining-room to the left of the entrance hall that was connected by a curving passage to the warm and muggy kitchens in the west wing and, running along the back of the house, a series of state rooms that looked over the gardens to the distant vista of the Conolly Folly, an immense brick structure on the northern horizon. These rooms were furnished in conventional grandeur, although Louisa put up relatively unadorned white plastered ceilings. The only room downstairs on which she lavished care was the antechamber to the state bedroom where ‘Speaker’ Conolly held morning levees in royal fashion. This Louisa made into her print-room.

  The print-room was assembled by pasting prints on to cream-painted wallpaper, surrounding them with elaborate frames with bows and swags cut from printed sheets and then hanging whole sections on to the walls. The work suited Louisa’s careful temperament and her interest in drawing and copying. Like most aristocratic girls Louisa was given drawing lessons, but unlike most she continued them long after they had done their work in the marriage market. Caroline pronounced Louisa an ‘ingenious’ girl and praised her copies from old master drawings. Louisa took lessons from Mr Warren, a Dublin drawing master who taught the Carton girls the delicate art of copying and the Carton boys the kind of geometrical drawing that would help them if they took up a military career or wanted to survey and alter their parklands. Louisa sent her sisters some of her copies, with instructions to hang them high so that the mistakes would not show. She also tried her hand at oil painting, painting directly on to distempered walls and handiwork of all sorts. From Paris she brought a number of wood blocks for printing on cloth. ‘I am so busy painting some flowers with the French stamps upon white satin to hang a little closet with, that I should scarcely find time to write to you if I did not begin of a Sunday,’ she told Sarah in 1768, adding, ‘its the quickest work that I ever saw, quite a work suited to your genius, and, when done, altogether it looks very pretty, tho’ coarse when you examine it.’

  From the early 1760s onwards, Louisa was also patiently assembling prints of suitable subjects and sizes to create a print-room. Prints were sold either individually or in packets of four, six, ten or more. In 1766 she wrote to Sarah: ‘any time that you chance to go into a print shop, I should be obliged to you if you would buy me five or six large prints. There are some of Teniers, engraved by Le Bas, which, I am told are larger than the common size. If you meet with any, pray send a few.’ Word went out amongst the family that Louisa was building a collection. On his grand tour, William, Emily’s second son who became the Duke of Leinster’s heir after the death of Ophaly, was a dutiful searcher. He sent a large batch of prints from Rome in 1767 with carte blanche for Louisa to take her pick. Louisa’s own account books show that she went on buying prints, in twos and threes, throughout the next decade. ‘Paid Mr. Bushell for prints, £1:2:2½’ appeared in 1766, as did ‘paid for Lady Sarah Bunbury’s print £1:1:0’, ‘£1.2.9 for a subscription for prints’ in 1771, ‘3 prints at 15s’ in 1773, and so on.

  Louisa was not alone in making such a place. Print-rooms were sufficiently numerous for printers to produce pattern sheets from which borders were cut out and assembled. Gentlemen coming into their property often had a closet with engravings picked up on the Grand Tour: a reminder of their youthful adventures and an advertisement of their completed education and supposed learning. Women had print-rooms too, often more intimate affairs, with genre scenes to supplement classical landscapes, and engravings of friends and relations. From the grandest houses to the humblest hovels prints were stuck on the walls; storybook illustrations, vignettes from Bible stories, moral tales and cartoons that savaged the governments of the day. Emily had some sort of print-room at Carton, made while Sarah was still there in the 1750s. Lady Clanbrassil, an active mutual friend of Emily’s and Louisa’s who lived at Templeogue on the outskirts of Dublin, had prints of her friends stuck up in her private closet. Amongst them was the engraving of Reynolds’s portrait of Sarah sacrificing to the Graces. From Templeogue Louisa wrote to Sarah in the summer of 1766: ‘I am with Lady Clanbrassil, who desires a thousand loves to you. She has employed me in cutting out a border to go round your print which she has put up in her closet. It was pleasant work for me as I looked at your dear Fiz. all the time.’

  Louisa’s print-room satisfied her immoderate desire for swagging (she also had swagging on her mantelpieces and purple ribbons round her bed) and her pleasure in planning, ordering and balancing. Each of the four walls was arranged around a central image. On the north wall was a Van Dyck of the children of Charles I in which the Lennox sisters’ great-grandfather stood between his two sisters. Opposite them was Sarah, sacrificing to the Graces. On the east and west walls were two prints of Garrick. The first showed him between tragedy and comedy, after Reynolds, the second with Mrs Cibber, after Zoffany. Other prints were set in symmetry round these images. Some were included because they fitted a space (a portrait of Pitt the Younger, for instance); others because they were part of a set. But many carried a moral or showed an activity that played a part in Louisa’s life. Like the gallery at Holland House then, the print-room had an autobiographical element; it was in part a self-portrait as well as a disparate collection of images. There were vignettes that showed maternal and filial responsibility, images of hunting and card playing and many genre scenes that carried moral messages and hints of mortality.

  On the north wall, for instance, around the Van Dyck print there were five occasional pieces, six genre scenes and two overtly moral pieces, ‘The Death of Seneca’, extolling stoicism, and ‘Le Bon Exemple’, which offered an example of industriousness. The occasional scenes included a mother and child, a courting couple, Vermeer’s ‘Lady Writing a Letter’, a print after Rembrandt called ‘The Philosopher in Meditation’ and a French print, ‘Mlle. sa Soeur’. Genre and rural scenes, people drinking in taverns, family groups or hunting parties, almost always contained visual messages which undercut any jollity they might display. Fallen trees, peeled fruit, spilt milk, broken egg-shells, snuffed candles – all these delivered reminders of death and sermons against vanity and folly. ‘The Pretty Kitchen Maid’ (after Boucher) on the north wall, for instance, spiced a seduction scene with hints of deflowering (the prominent key hanging below the maid’s waist, the lacy cabbage laid out on the table) and reminders of death and decay (the empty pan and glass, the guttering candles and the broken sticks in the foreground). Louisa’s print-room was full of images like this. It was at once an entertainment and an encyclopedia of examples and warnings.

  The print-room was only one of several improvements to Castletown that were being made simultaneously through the 1760s and 1770s. As the Castletown account books show, plastering, gilding, glazing, tiling, carpentry and painting in various parts of the house continued unabated for decades. Conolly’s incomplete and haphazard accounts record a steady stream of large disbursements: in 1766, £150 for ‘carpenter’s bill for work at Castletown’, in 1767 ‘plastering £14’, ‘slating £42.14.4’, ‘Bowers paid in full on account of carpentry work £175.8.1’, ‘paid Tilbury the bill for glazing this house £67.3.3’, ‘paid Tilbury his bill in full for glazing hot houses, melon beds etc’, ‘paid Mr. Carnoss his bill of painters’ work done on the whole house £251.0.2½’, ‘paid Cavinagh his bill of iron work £101.1.1’; in 1768, ‘paid Bowers on account of hot houses, espaliers etc £150.0’, ‘paid Mr. Cranfield for carving and gilding drawing rooms, dining room etc, £223.1.5’. Year after year the payments went on, until by the turn of the cen
tury, Conolly had spent £25,000. It was a huge sum but, for him, little more than a year’s income. Besides, Castletown, as he made clear in a letter of 1773, took the place of children. ‘I had no occasion to save money, having no children, and I flatter myself that the money I spent annually was rationally employed by living, not extravagantly, but like a gentleman.’

  In the 1770s, Louisa’s major decorative project was the Castletown long gallery. The long gallery ran the length of the house at the back. Its eight windows looked north across formal gardens and parkland to the huge brick folly known as the Obelisk that looked like nothing more than a giant factory chimney. Louisa turned the gallery into an informal living-room that made the state rooms almost obsolete except for the grandest of occasions. The original gallery, bare and cheerless, was transformed into a painted room which, by virtue of its length and two fireplaces, could be used for several occupations simultaneously. By the end of 1774 the gallery was complete except for the painted decorations. The coved ceiling was heavily gilded but otherwise left blank. From each of its three compartments hung a big two-tiered Venetian chandelier, swagging solidified into glass, in pink, blue and clear crystal. The ends of the room were dominated by fireplaces, over which hung portraits of Tom and Louisa, his by Mengs, hers by Reynolds. On the walls were French mirrors, several bookcases and plinths with classical busts. The spaces in between were to be filled in with paintings by an English decorative artist, Mr Reily. Louisa had seen Reily working at Goodwood and engaged him to come to Castletown as soon as his job for the Duke of Richmond was completed. Reily arrived, somewhat reluctantly, in Ireland in the summer of 1775. Unlike most painters he worked not at piece rates but by the month. At less than £100 a year he was reckoned a bargain. As Sarah put it, ‘his taste, his execution, his diligence and his price are really a treasure, and will not be met with again. For Mr. Conolly and Louisa [cannot in conscience] to give him so little as a £100 a year and [they] mean to add a little more to it.’