Newbridge: flock of ages

Newbridge House: the Drawing Room’s flock wallpaper, border and composition chair rail by Patrick Boylan, 1822 (photo: Eugene Langan)

Newbridge House in north County Dublin offers visitors a strikingly authentic experience of an Irish country house interior. The house boasts a rich collection of paintings and objects gathered by successive generations of the Cobbe family, while much of the furniture, furnishings and decoration from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries survives substantially unaltered.  Newbridge was designed by Scottish architect James Gibbs for Archbishop Charles Cobbe in the late 1740s and has been home to the family since then. Since 1985 the house and its grounds have been open to the public and in the care of Fingal County Council (previously Dublin County Council), although the Cobbes still have occasional but regular use of the house.

Newbridge House: the Museum Room (photo: Newbridge House and Farm)

The sense of authenticity is matched by an impression that Newbridge has always been inhabited lovingly by its owners, whose at times curious and eclectic tastes are nowhere more evident than in the Museum Room, with its Chinese wallpaper and glass-fronted cabinets, which contain a fascinating assortment of natural and man-made wonders.  The Drawing Room, where the wallpaper, curtains and carpet date from the 1820s, is magnificient, and  looks essentially as it did two hundred years ago. The informal and somewhat crowded arrangement of the furniture appears at first glance to be an embodiment of Victorian clutter, but is in fact likely to reflect an earlier taste. In a letter of 1821, the novelist Maria Edgeworth described a similar room in Packenham Hall as being  ‘a delightful abundance of sofas and cushions and chairs and tables of all sorts and sizes’ – a description that could well be applied to the Drawing Room at Newbridge.

Newbridge House: the Drawing Room (photo: Newbridge House and Farm)

The magnificient curtains and pelmets which adorn the bow window have recently been conserved, thanks to a substantial donation from the Apollo Foundation, while the flock wallpaper has – at considerably less expense – benefited from several episodes of gentle conservation, aimed at re-attaching loose sections and repairing splits in the paper. This minimalist approach to the care of the wallpaper is nothing new, judging by the presence of numerous upholstery tacks of unknown date holding the paper to the wall where it meets the cornice.

Gentle rehabilitation: conservator Ros Devitt at work re-attaching loose paper

Entries in the Cobbe account books at Newbridge show that the wallpaper and border were made and installed by employees of Patrick Boylan, the pre-eminent Irish ‘paper-stainer’ of his time. Boylan also supplied the moulded composition chair rail, whose scroll ornamentation is identical to that in the State Bedroom at Castle Coole, County Fermanagh, another scheme where crimson flock wallpaper by Boylan is preserved. Boylan worked at Newbridge on several occasions between 1811 and 1834, and in 1822 presented a large bill for £83, which probably included the flock wallpaper. A year later, the sum of £68 was paid to Messrs English & Beck of Bath, for the carpet, which is still in the room, while the curtains, by Dublin upholsterers Gibton and Mack, did not go up until 1828. The resulting ensemble is impressive, imposing and very red.  But what colour were the walls before then? Recent conservation work has revealed some clues as to how the room was decorated in earlier periods, before Boylan’s men got to work.

Newbridge was given to Archbishop Cobbe’s son Thomas and daughter-in-law Lady Betty Cobbe (Elizabeth Beresford), following their marriage in 1755. Around 1762, the couple added the drawing-room-cum-picture gallery as a place to entertain guests and to display some of their large collection of paintings and objects. The account books record that the ornate ceiling and cornice were created by Irish stuccadore Richard Williams, (who took the opportunity to marry the family’s nurse while he was there), but say nothing about how the walls were decorated at that time.  A very tiny fragment of green flock paper (about the size of a pea) found clinging to the plaster wall may indicate this first scheme. Certainly, flock papers were very much in vogue in the 1760s, and were considered a suitable backdrop for paintings in gilt frames.

This tiny fragment of green flock may be all that remains of the room’s first wallpaper

Considerably more survives of a second eighteenth-century wallpaper and its border. The main pattern is an arrangement of monochrome grey floral sprays against what was once a rich yellow background, while the border (around 2 inches wide) has a design of tulips and leaves printed in pink, red, green and black on a yellow ground matching the main paper. This scheme extended down to the skirting, and the border was used around door and window architraves as well as along the skirting and – presumably – cornice.

Yellow ground floral paper and tulip border, 1780s or 1790s

Because the fragment of green flock and the yellow floral paper were not found together, it is impossible to say with certainty which came first. The style of the floral paper suggests the 1780s or 1790s, while green flock papers are known to have been popular at an earlier period. It therefore seems safe to assume that the green scheme preceded the yellow one. If so, the upbeat floral patterned paper with its cheerful coloured border represented a drastic change in style – one wonders how the collection of paintings in their gilt frames would have looked against the yellow background.

Tulip border, block printed in four colours on a yellow ground

The Newbridge account books record payments to Dublin paper-stainer James Dunne in 1783 and 1791 – the latter entry included a gratuity or tip paid to the workmen for finishing several rooms. It is more than possible that one of these entries record the installation of the yellow paper.

The next change to the room’s appearance is likely to have occurred in or shortly after 1810, when Thomas Cobbe gave Newbridge to his grandson Charles, who lived there until his death in 1857. The Drawing Room’s yellow floral scheme was covered over with lining paper which was then painted in turquoise-blue distemper, extensive areas of which survive. We can guess that this happened when Charles took possession of the house, finding the floral paper outmoded, or simply not to his taste. It may have been Patrick Boylan’s men who carried out this redecoration: a payment is noted in the accounts for 1811.

This turquoise-blue distemper covered the walls of the Drawing Room from around 1810 until the crimson flock was installed in 1823

If this is correct, the blue scheme remained in place for eleven years before Boylan’s men returned to the Drawing Room with the red flock paper in 1822. They first fitted the new chair rail with its scroll ornamentation, then stripped the walls above it back to the plaster (helpfully leaving the pea-sized piece of green flock). Clearly having the interests of future historians in mind, they left the yellow floral paper and the blue distemper scheme in place below the chair rail, simply painting over the distemper with an off-white oil paint to match the colour of the woodwork. The walls above were then lined before the flock paper and border were applied.

The evidence suggests that the Drawing Room at Newbridge was decorated four times in the first sixty years of its existence, each makeover embodying a marked shift in taste. By contrast, the present scheme has remained in place for two centuries, and is unlikely to be replaced any time soon.