Castletown: closeted away

A look inside a cupboard reveals a sequence of papers spanning almost a century, and the origin of the ‘Castletown Chintz’ wallpaper.

The timber panelled walls of the Lady Kildare Room on the first floor of Castletown, County Kildare, have recently been painted in ‘Aerial Tint’, a soft but fresh blue colour, providing an upbeat backdrop for a collection of portrait miniatures and other paintings on permanent loan from the Irish Georgian Society.  The colour used on the same panelling in the mid-eighteenth century might have been the grey shade still visible on woodwork in Louisa Conolly’s Bedroom on the same  floor  – a more muted colour. The reason why this early eighteenth century paintwork is still visible lies in the change in taste towards  wallpaper during the 1740s and 50s, when the only practical way to paper over the uneven surfaces of a panelled room was to nail a tightly stretched linen or hessian cloth across the walls and decorate over this. In Castletown several rooms preserved these cloth linings until the 1960s, when most were removed and discarded as part of a return to what was then perceived as a more authentic eighteenth century look. Unfortunately, it is likely that some of these contained layers of wallpaper going back to the time of Louisa Conolly or even before.

All was not lost, however. In the Lady Kildare Room the earliest wallpaper and the three subsequent patterns used in the room have survived with their fabric lining on the walls inside a built-in wall cupboard.

Circa 1740-1790

Circa 1800

Irish, 1805-1825

Circa 1840-1860

Visitors are now able to see four wallpapers spanning roughly the period when Castletown was home to Lady Louisa Conolly, daughter of the Duke of Richmond and wife of Thomas Conolly M.P. , great-nephew of the house’s builder William ‘Speaker’ Conolly. Louisa came to live in Castletown in 1759 and immediately began a major programme of reconstruction and redecoration which lasted for decades. She died at Castletown in 1821. But the earliest paper in the cupboard may pre-date Louisa’s arrival.

This is printed with a floral trail pattern of a type which would have been known in eighteenth century Ireland as a ‘chintz’ pattern. Based on the patterns used on imported Indian cottons, chintz papers were regularly advertised by Dublin paper stainers (as wallpaper printers were known) from around 1750, and the many examples or fragments which have been found in Ireland show that these papers were highly fashionable.

 Like most other examples, the paper in the Lady Kildare Room was made by printing the outlines of the stems and leaves in black with a wooden block onto plain off-white paper, and then adding colours with the aid of brushes and stencils. The colours used in this case were blue, yellow and pink. Green for the leaves would have been made using blue and yellow, but the yellow has faded, leaving the leaves blue. The design has been given added sophistication by the inclusion of a background pattern formed of tiny ‘pin-dots’, made by driving brass pins into the surface of the printing block . Produced more than half a century before the invention of paper-making machinery, the pattern is printed onto rolls made from small, hand-made sheets, joined edge-to-edge.

English wallpaper, circa 1740 (Victoria and Albert Museum)

Floral trail and chintz-style patterns are difficult to date, as they were produced throughout the eighteenth century. The pin-dot background pattern of the Castletown chintz paper does not help to narrow the date range of this paper, as the technique is found in papers as early as the 1680s.

Two floral trail patterns with pin dots in the Victoria and Albert Museum come from  a room in St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and are given a date of circa 1740 in the museum catalogue. The outline of the leaf at the top edge of the lower fragment is similar to the leaves in the Castletown Paper.

Wallpaper from Uppark, Sussex, 1750-80 (Victoria and Albert Museum)

Also in the V and A collection, a floral trail wallpaper without pin dots from Uppark, Sussex has obvious similarities to the Castletown paper. This one  is given a date range in the catalogue of 1750-80.

This brief survey of comparative examples shows that the Castletown chintz paper could have been in place in the 1740s. This would mean that it was hung during the the lifetime of Speaker Conolly’s widow Katherine, or during the brief period when the house was occupied from 1752-4 by his nephew William Conolly, his wife Anne and their children. Compared to Louisa’s well-recorded activities, little is known about the decorative choices made by these earlier Conollys. An account dated 1749 for flock wallpaper bought by William (then residing in Leixlip Castle) from the Dublin paper stainer Bernard Messink  survives among the Castletown papers, so we know at least that he was not averse to buying wallpaper. On William’s death in 1754 the family moved to England, and Castletown remained unoccupied until the arrival of Louisa and Tom Conolly in 1759.

Castletown House has been in State care under the Office of Public Works since 1993. The presentation of the interior and its collections of furniture, art and objects benefits greatly from the (largely voluntary) input of the Castletown Foundation, whose co-chairman, conservation architect David Sheehan, guided the refurbishment and re-imagining of the Lady Kildare Room.