The largest grant which the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland have ever given in our 98 years history has been the €20,000 which made possible the 2019 purchase at auction in London of the beautiful portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds of Emily FitzGerald, Duchess of Leinster (1731-1814), and its return to Ireland.
This striking painting had hung for many years in Carton, County Kildare, ancestral home of the Dukes of Leinster (which is now a hotel). It was one of a number of important paintings recently sold by the 9th Duke, who lives in England. The balance of the cost was provided jointly by the Office of Public Works and the Castletown Foundation. It now hangs in Castletown House, near Celbridge, County Kildare.
The FNCI were able to provide a grant of this size only because we recently received an unexpected and generous bequest in a will. It would otherwise have been impossible for us to do so since our only regular income is the annual subscriptions of our members. We are proud to have enabled the return to Ireland of this lovely painting which is part of our country’s heritage and can now be appreciated and enjoyed by future generations. This is what the FNCI is for!
Lady Emily FitzGerald was not just the wife of a man who was an important figure in the political life of 18th century Ireland; she was very much a personality in her own right. Married young to James FitzGerald, 20th Earl of Kildare and later 1st Duke of Leinster, she was the mother of eighteen children, one of them Lord Edward FitzGerald, United Irishman and a leader of the insurrection of 1798, and three more children following her remarriage. Much of the duke’s political success was attributed to her as, from their homes in Carton (which she extensively redesigned), Frescati,Blackrock, County Dublin (a supermarket stands there now) and Leinster House, they played a significant role in the political life of the country, her own sympathies being radical.
Castletown House , the earliest and largest Palladian house in Ireland, was built in 1722-29 by William Conolly, the immensely rich Speaker of the Irish House of Commons. It was described by an English visitor fifty years later as ”the only house in Ireland to which the term palace can be applied.” Here another dynamic woman, Lady Emily’s sister Louisa who was married to Thomas Conolly, presided. After the last of the family, the Conolly-Carews, left in 1965 it was saved from developers by the generosity and foresight of Desmond Guinness, co-founder of the Irish Georgian Society, who bought it and 120 acres of its surrounding demesne. Subsequently maintained by the Irish Georgian Society , and then by the Castletown Foundation, it was taken into public ownership in 1994. The house and lands are maintained by the OPW and open to the public, while the important furniture and fittings (much of them original to the house) are owned by the Castletown Foundation who have, like the IGS before , painstakingly acquired them over the years with the help of Irish and American philanthropists. It is in every way a fitting home for Lady Emily’s portrait.
