Our Georgian heritage extends beyond the facades and fanlights, with the decorative plasterwork of that era finally getting the considered attention it deserves, writes Eileen Battersby
Look around you, even now as Dublin city continues the dreary process of becoming like any other modern, commercialised metropolis pulverised by an ever- changing army of international brand names, there remains the saving grace of its Georgian legacy. The architectural splendour of the few surviving late 18th-century squares and individual landmark buildings seduce the eye and even manage to blank out much of the contemporary ugliness we have created.
Behind the fine doorways with their elegant fanlights are further wonders, the surviving rococo and neoclassical decorative plasterwork of the Georgian interior dating from a period in which homeowners wanted their dwellings to reflect a continental cosmopolitan flair.
The rococo gave way to the neoclassicism of the Adam style as perfected by the Scottish architect, Robert Adam. One Dublin stuccodor knew exactly what his clients wanted, and set out to provide it. Michael Stapleton may not be a household name, yet in his time he was a dominant designer, greatly in demand.
Today he is best represented by three outstanding examples of his work: the ceiling of the exam hall in Trinity College; the glorious decoration to be seen in parts of Powerscourt House in South William Street; and throughout Belvedere House on Great Denmark Street.
Stapleton was a practising stuccodor who worked with a number of architects and designers and became a designer in his own right. His collection of 183 surviving working drawings and decorative designs was presented to the National Library of Ireland in 1940. Now quality plates of these drawings have been published for the first time in a handsome volume, The Stapleton Collection, with valuable commentaries by architectural historian Conor Lucey. Four of the five chapters examine the work of Stapleton, and there is also a comprehensive survey of plasterwork as practised in late 18th-century Ireland. The book also includes photographs of the work as it currently exists. The full-page photograph of a detail from the ceiling of the drawing room in Powerscourt House may well set readers on the trail of Stapleton's Dublin, as will the picture of the stair hall of Belvedere House.
It is interesting to consider Stapleton as the developer of his day, busy building terraced town houses. Lucey corrects the notion that Stapleton was an architect and refutes the tendency to describe him as "our Dublin Adam". He was instead, as accurately noted in the Macmillan Encyclopaedia of Architects, "the leading Dublin master builder and stuccoist of the late 18th century".
He was also less original than has often been claimed, but he was a fine craftsman capable of a degree of innovation within the strictures of the established neoclassical style.
Standing in the print room, itself an elegant space, of the National Library watching Conor Lucey, who wears a pair of soft white gloves as he takes individual pages from large portfolio files, the viewer becomes a witness.
Here are working drawings, many drawn by Stapleton dating from more than 200 years ago, meticulous, detailed and beautiful, depicting proposed designs for ceilings and decorative friezes, as well as some street facades and room plans.
Anyone who has looked at modern plans will be taken aback by the sheer artistry of them. Some are samples, offering suggestions and variations, others are sketches, impressions. There are notes, mere jottings in Georgian handwriting. Plasterwork decoration was a business done in the name of commerce and enterprise, yet there is also a grace. Few house plans of today could claim such artistry without pretension.
It is also worth noting that while Stapleton was popular and respected, architectural historians, particularly those with an interest in 18th-century plasterwork, tend to diminish the neoclassical achievement. Neoclassicism is not to everyone's taste. Champions of the earlier, more flamboyant rococo "native" style, as practised by Robert West, creator of the famous large birds on the stair hall in No 20, Lower Dominick Street, denounce the Adamesque style as cold and cliched and even repetitive.
Much of the neoclassical plasterwork did derive from pattern books, and lacked the formal sophistication of Robert Adam or James Wyatt, yet they have charm and invariably succeed in making us pause and ponder our present-day blandness.
SO WHO WAS Michael Stapleton? Relatively little is known about him and he is a surprise omission from Boylan's comprehensive A Dictionary of Irish Biography. He was born in Dublin in 1747, two years before the birth of Goethe. Stapleton's father may have been a plasterer. The family was Catholic, which makes it all the more interesting to see him working on a job at Trinity College - particularly as one of his major rivals, Charles Thorp, a Protestant, had by then decorated the Royal Exchange, now City Hall, the first neoclassical public building in Dublin.
Stapleton married the daughter of a Dublin timber merchant and they are known to have had at least four children, one of whom, George, continued the family plasterwork and building business. It was to die with him in 1841.
Nothing is known of Michael Stapleton's earliest training, aside from speculating that he had been drawn to building through his father's decorating business. Michael Stapleton is believed to have been apprenticed to Robert West; he certainly worked with him and was the sole executor of West's will in 1790. He also inherited his collection of 18th-century pattern books. West, as Lucey points out, has recently been attributed with the building of Belvedere House in Dublin. It seems that West himself, although influenced by the Swiss-Italian Lafranchini brothers, may well have, at least in his later years, partially embraced neoclassicism.
Stapleton died on August 8th 1801 and is buried in Malahide Abbey, alongside his wife and his two sons. Lucey notes that in his will, dated only four days before his death, he bequeathed £10 sterling to the "Roman Catholick Charity School of Liffey Street parish". If his origins were modest, he left a substantial practice and an impressive legacy of ornamented late 18th-century Irish interiors.
Aside from the decoration and the style, there is also the wealth of social history implicit in the work of craftsmen such as Stapleton. It also reflects the influence of the age of the "Grand Tour". Many artists, thinkers, poets, writers and architects travelled to Italy and experienced the antiquities of Ancient Rome, some travelled further to Greece. Motifs from classical myth and literature acquired near Biblical relevance. These images, figures of gods and goddesses, mythological deities, as well as clouds, tridents, thunder bolts, chariots, friezes of maidens, nymphs and cherubs, caught the visual imaginations of artists and architects alike. Many of the resulting great ceilings possessed strong narrative themes, while borders of garlands and recurring geometric shapes also feature.
Clients wanted houses that reflected the cultural sensibilities of their owners. If your splendid classically themed ceiling could tell a story, and perhaps even make a moral point, so much the better.
The history of plasterwork as practised in Ireland is for all its significance contained within a brief period. This great era of design began with the arrival of itinerant craftsmen such as the Lafranchini brothers, commissioned by Richard Castle to decorate the saloon of Carton House in Co Kildare. In 1755, the Flemish master, Barthelemij Cramillion, arrived in Dublin to decorate the ceiling of the Rotunda Hospital chapel. The elder brother Lafranchini brother, Paolo, had worked for James Gibbs in England. Gibbs is now believed to have been the architect of Newbridge House in north Co Dublin.
THE BROTHERS DREW on figures such as Neptune and Ceres, Pluto and Persephone, the hapless daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and, of course, they used Zeus and Jove. But the hand-modelled was to be overtaken by the premoulded. Ultimately styles change and West appears to stand in between the two. Lucey points out "the fashion for neoclassicism in the latter decades of the 18th century was also reflected in the updating of older houses in the new style." No 4 Henrietta Street, built circa 1745, was updated in the 1780s, and some of the rooms, including the stairwell, were redecorated in the neoclassical style.
Dublin's Georgian architecture has been well served by Maurice Craig, Edward McParland and Christine Casey, while CP Curran wrote extensively on Dublin's decorative plasterwork. Patrick Healy and Joseph McDonnell looked to Europe in their important monograph, Irish 18th-Century Stuccowork and its European Sources (National Library, 1991), and Lucey's new study is a valuable addition to the existing literature on the subject.
Admiring Stapleton's work in situ is a privilege. Looking at the drawings is a revelation. This is the only surviving craftsman's portfolio of the period and gives a valuable insight into design practice and the process of decoration. The building of many of Ireland's great houses may be traced through architectural plans and drawings that have survived. But craftsmen did not tend to leave a paper trail. Thankfully, Michael Stapleton, assisted no doubt by having a son who took over his practice, did.
The Stapleton Collection: Designs for the Irish Neoclassical Interior, by Conor Lucey, is published by the Churchill Press in association with the National Library of Ireland, 65