A glimpse of the sublime Russborough House, Co Wicklow, Ireland A property of the Alfred Beit Foundation

The redecoration of a drawing room offers a fascinating insight into the aesthetic preoccupations of Grand Tourism in the mid 18th century, as John Goodall explains

- John Goodall

LAST year, work was completed to the restoration of a 1750s drawing room in one of Ireland’s most celebrated Georgian country houses.

The re-creation of the original picture hang and decoration within this important interior was made possible by a combination of redis- coveries, scientific investigation and research. It offers a remarkable—and in some points unexpected—window into the tastes of the period. Alec Cobbe, who has overseen this project, has published a short account of the work, The Vernet Drawing Room (2024), to which this article is indebted.

Russborough House was built by Joseph Leeson, Viscount Russborough from 1760 and 1st Earl of Milltown from 1763 (COUNTRY LIFE, June 10, 2009). Leeson was the son of a Dublin brewer and property developer, who entered into an estimated fortune of £50,000 at the age of 30 in 1741. About a year later, he purchased the Russeltown estate— which became Russborough—about 20 miles south of Dublin, and began a new house on the grandest scale (Fig 1). Frustratingly, almost nothing about the construction of the house is documented.

Leeson’s architect is thought to have been Richard Castle (possibly working with gentleman amateur Francis Bindon), the son of an English-born Jew called Joseph Riccardo, who became director of Munitions and Mines to Friedrich Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. Castle himself seems to have travelled in Europe as a military engineer and had settled in Ireland by 1728, becoming assistant to Edward Lovett Pearce, a distant cousin of Vanbrugh and latterly surveyor-general.

Both Pearce and Castle were enthusiasts for the compact and symmetrical villa designs popularised in Britain by the 16th-century Vincentine, Andrea Palladio, in his architectural treatise