Irish Arts Review

Cooper's Ireland: Drawings and Notes from an Eighteenth-Century Gentleman by PeterHarbisonReview by: Martyn AngleseaIrish Arts Review Yearbook, Vol. 18 (2002), p. 195Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25488327 .

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Book Reviews

So comprehensive is this volume that it

would be possible to devote this review

entirely to social history: to reformation

history; or indeed to the history of cathe

dral music in Ireland. Barra Boydell has

four fascinating chapters bringing the

music of Christ Church to light all the

way from the days of the medieval priory to 1970. He shows how Christ Church

and St Patrick's effectively shared the same organists and choirmen between the

Restoration and 1865 - an example of co

operation which would be unthinkable

today. His discussion of music in the

medieval cathedral of course involves the

magnificent Christ Church psalter, a

splendidly illuminated manuscript made

for Prior Stephen de Derby (1348-82) which is now in the Bodleian Library. But

whether the music sung at that period was

plainchant or polyphony cannot be

exactly determined. But by the end of the

15th century the basis of the Anglican choral tradition can be traced with cer

tainty to the introduction of polyphony and the addition of boys' voices first in St

Patrick's in 1431 and then in Christ

Church in 1480. In its present form Christ Church as a

building represents a high Victorian

dream of what an early medieval cathedral

should look like. The restoration of St

Patrick's had been financed entirely by Sir

Benjamin Lee Guinness who refused to

employ any architect, as did Mr Ambrose

Congreive more recently at Waterford

Cathedral with rather similar results. At

least Christ Church was put into the

hands of a leading architect of the day in

the person of George Edmund Street. The

overly generous funding by Henry Roe, a

Dublin distiller, enabled Street to sweep away the long choir and to create a new

chancel on the lines of the late

Romanesque building. As Roger Stalley points out, the reconstruction of Christ

Church occupies a key position in the his

tory of Victorian architecture. While

Street claimed to be against the needless

removal of old work he believed it was the task of the restorer to recover and recreate

the intended design of the original archi

tect, 'which at times required the sacrifice

of later additions or alterations -

the

architect was the creative force in

medieval building; he established the

design, the workers merely followed his

directions; the design was the precious

thing, not the actual fabric'

Recreation continued on a grand scale

at Christ Church - the final cost to Henry Roe being the then enormous sum of

?160,000.

The Very Revd ROBERT MacCarthy is Dean of St

Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin

Coopers Ireland: Drawings and Notes

from an Eighteenth-Century Gentleman

By Peter Harbison

O'Brien Press/National Library of Ireland 2000

h/b L25.

288pp. 132 b/w ills 0-86278-645-2

Martyn Anglesea

This book is not about cars, whether

Austin Coopers or Mini Coopers. Austin

Cooper (1759-1830) had a hereditary Christian name, recurring over nine gen

erations, like the Belfast banking family of

Batt, at least six of whom bore the name

Narcissus, or the Liverpool family

Gascoigne, which passed the name

Bamber down the centuries. Consequently

this Austin Cooper is referred to as 'FSA'

or 'the Antiquary'. He ranks with Captain

Francis Grose (1731-91), Gabriel Beranger (1729-1817) and George Petrie (1790

1866) among the assiduous graphic

recorders of Ireland's antiquities. His copi ous notes and sketches were carefully

looked after by the Cooper family until

examined by the National Library of Ireland in the 1950s, and finally entered the Library's topographical collections

after 1993.

Two albums of drawings are now in the

Prints and Drawings Department, and the

diaries and correspondence went to the

Manuscripts Department, which is still

cataloguing the material. Dr Peter

Harbison, formerly of Bord Failte, has

already produced two illustrated books on

Beranger's antiquarian drawings. Together

with Professor Roger Stalley's publication of the watercolours of Francis Grose's

nephew, Daniel Grose (c 1766-1838) (Irish

Architectural Archive, 1992), we now

have a convenient visual record of the

workings of late Georgian antiquaries in

Ireland.

Austin Cooper's drawings are all in

monochrome, mostly pen and Indian ink

wash, so it is pointless to reproduce them

in colour. They look rather old-fashioned

for their date, not much different from

the drawings and engravings which

Samuel Buck (1696-1779) and his

brother Nathaniel were producing in

England in the 1720s and 30s. Most even

have the frames of ruled or compassed

lines, which recall the Bucks, also the neat copperplate titles, signatures, and

dates. His figures can be lively and amus

ing. At the end of the book Harbison

prints maps summarising the extent of

Cooper's travels. Cooper was by profes

sion a tax collector working from Dublin

Castle, a post obtained for him by his

uncle. Originally from Surrey, the family had settled in county Meath in the mid

17th century. The job must have involved

danger but the necessary travel enabled

Austin Cooper to exercise his vocation.

There is a concentration of drawings of

sites immediately west of Dublin, in

Meath, Kildare, Laois, and Tipperary, a

few in Cork, Waterford, and Limerick, one in Kerry, a sparse amount in Galway,

Mayo, and Sligo, and only three in Ulster - two in Fermanagh and one in Antrim.

But Harbison tells us in the introduction

that much of Cooper's work is lost. 'At

great trouble', his descendants collected

twelve diaries out of a total of fifty-two.

While most of Cooper's subjects are cas

tles, churches, monastic remains, round

towers, and such, there is one drawing of a

modern building, the bridge built by Thomas Ivory for the Duke of Devonshire at Lismore, county Waterford in 1777, then only four years old. Harbison's com

ments, set opposite each full-page illustra

tion, are detailed and scholarly but

readable. Sometimes he reproduces a

modern photograph to show how the site

has changed. The only thing I do not like

about this volume is its garish orange and

blue dust jacket. MARTYN ANGLESEA is Keeper of Art at the Ulster Museum

195 Irish Arts Re v i k w

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