The decision to sell Russborough House’s precious treasures is artless

AN irreplaceable part of Ireland’s patrimony is to be auctioned off in London, though last Saturday President Michael D Higgins presided at the 20th anniversary celebration of the Heritage Council, writes Gerard Howlin.

As the first arts minister at the cabinet table, Higgins put the Heritage Council on a statutory footing. In a disconcerting coincidence, the sale of treasures from Russborough House is scheduled for July 9. The importance of Russborough is not just its grandeur, it is its contents. Desmond FitzGerald, the late Knight of Glin, put it well a decade ago in The Irish Arts Review: “Only Newbridge remains relatively intact, but it was never quite as grand as Russborough.” Newbridge House, in Donabate, County Dublin, is home to the Cobbe family, who are still in residence, and it is open to the public. I hope the Cobbes won’t mind my writing that in a once hierarchical society, the Leesons, earls of Milltown at Russborough, were socially a step above. Russborough — a truly palatial Palladian house — benefitted from the arrival of the plutocratic Sir Alfred and Lady Beit, in 1952.

Unusually in that day, an old house found new money. It was newish money, complete with an astonishing art collection. The importance of contents, and the accretion of history and taste, are critical context for any house. Interestingly, this year marks the publication of The Cobbe Cabinet of Curiosities, An Anglo-Irish Country House Museum, a lavish appraisal of the mostly intact collection of an Irish family. Russborough, alas, may not be so lucky. Its curiosities, at least the ones still in the house, are — like a scene in a Seán O’Casey play — being ‘pawned’, sold one by one.