Clanricarde Portrait

Brackloon Castle is home to an interesting portrait of John Thomas de Burgh, 13th Earl of Clanricarde. A distinguished career soldier, he only inherited the title in 1797 at the age of fifty-three on the death of his older brother. As an army general, he was described to Commodore Horatio Nelson as 'one of the most gentlemanlike in the world...cool and well skilled in his profession' with a reputation for spirit and courage. As earl, he became head of the de Burghs of Clanricarde, for centuries the leading family of County Galway, whose principal seat was Portumna Castle on the shores of Lough Derg.

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The artist’s identity is not recorded and the painting was initially classified as the work of an artist of the English School. Later it was attributed to the Anglo-Indian School, possibly on the basis of its exotic-looking background. However, the earl never served in India and from a comparison with such contemporary portraits as those of Anne Bingham, wife of Christopher French St. George and her sister Letitia, we believe that this is almost certainly the work of John Ryan. This provincial, almost naïve, Irish artist flourished during the last decades of the eighteenth century and many of his patrons appear to have been West of Ireland gentry.

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Very few examples of Ryan’s work survive. We know that Clanricarde was familiar to Ryan, as the artist painted him as part of a large oil painting he completed in 1796 for Walter Lawrence's new mansion at Bellevue, only six miles from Brackloon. Lawrence was an enthusiastic supporter of the Irish Volunteers, patriotically inspired part-time military corps established to defend Ireland against a possible French invasion and help maintain law and order. Erroneously described as a mural, the painting was prominently displayed in Bellevue's Constantine Hall and depicted the earl, then a senior army officer, inspecting the Bellevue or Lawrencetown Volunteers at a review some twelve years earlier. The antiquarian Lord Walter Fitzgerald visited Bellevue in 1912, prior to its demolition and described the picture witheringly as ‘painted in a very amateurish fashion and of doubtful taste.’ The loss of the painting he felt ‘would not be great.’ One year later, Walter Strickland published his 'Dictionary of Irish Artists.' Following Fitzgerald's account regarding the painting at Bellevue, he dismissed Ryan with the assertion that 'nothing was known of the painter, and his art, such as it is, was probably merely local.'

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​At Bellevue, the earl was only one among a number of figures depicted in a group. At Brackloon he is the sole subject. The choice of Ryan to paint an individual portrait of Clanricarde would appear unlikely. When considering the earl’s elevated social position, one would assume a more distinguished painter would have been engaged. As a younger man and possibly at the behest of his mother, the earl was painted by the infinitely more refined artist George Romney. Later in life he was portrayed by the accomplished Henry Edridge and possibly Charles Shirreff. Yet the fact remains that he was also painted by an artist of Ryan’s ability and the picture retained among the family portraits.

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Notwithstanding Fitzgerald's poor opinion of his talents, Ryan was the choice of a small number of prominent county families. Among them were the Lawrences of Bellevue with whom the heiress of the Maddens of Brackloon was intermarried in the early 1700s. Ryan’s patron at Bellevue; the wealthy and cultivated Walter Lawrence, had not only undertaken the Grand Tour but was an acquaintance and sometime patron of the famed Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. Yet Lawrence chose Ryan to paint some of the most prominent spaces in his lavishly-decorated mansion. While Bellevue was Ryan’s largest commission of which we are aware, an individual portrait of Clanricarde (if indeed he was the artist) must surely have been his most prestigious sitting.

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The earl was painted by Romney in the 1770s in the uniform of the Foot Guards. At that stage he was a young man around his early thirties. When painted by Edridge in 1798 he was in his fifties. He appears of an age mid-way between the two in the Brackloon portrait and, viewed together with the style of uniform, would initially suggest a date sometime in the 1780s.

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When compared with other surviving representations of the earl, the best that may be said of this likeness is that it bears certain similarities of some features even if poorly arranged. Despite the primitive nature of the Brackloon portrait and his inability to represent particular anatomical features such as the ear and mouth, the artist went to some length to capture the detail of the sitter’s uniform. Here this portrait is particularly interesting as it is the only known representation of the uniform of the Clanricarde Volunteers, initially raised in 1779 by the earl’s father, a passionate and vocal supporter of the Volunteers.

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The subject in this portrait is wearing the silver 'flaming grenade' buttons and distinctive shoulder-belt plate of the Clanricarde Volunteers, an identical example of which was sold in Dublin in 2007. The Clanricarde Volunteers comprised the Portumna Clanricarde Guards, Loughrea & Clanricarde Battalion and Loughrea & Clanricarde Artillery in 1784 while on another occasion comprised separate cavalry and infantry corps with supporting artillery. Throughout his career the earl was associated with infantry regiments and the style of uniform seen here is that of the infantry, dating from the 1780s at the latest. More specifically, the wings on his shoulders and possibly the bearskin hat in his hand, identify him as having served as an officer of a flank company, in which capacity he served in the mid 1770s with the Foot Guards in the American War of Independence. 

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Over his long career Clanricarde served in various regiments in the regular army, raising one of those regiments himself, the Connaught Rangers, in the West of Ireland. Yet he is painted here in the uniform of his family's Volunteer unit with which he had little active involvement. The choice of uniform for this portrait then appears deliberate and suggests it may have been in some way commemorative, in the same manner as Lawrence’s marking of his family association with the Volunteers.

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Following their father's death in 1782, both Clanricarde and his elder brother showed themselves initially supportive of the political reforms espoused by the Irish Volunteer movement and in January 1783 he was approached to run as their parliamentary election candidate for County Galway. He declined the invitation but he was clearly aligned to a degree with the Volunteers and does appear to have spent at least some time in the county around these early years of the 1780s. 

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If Clanricarde sat to Ryan, the opportunity for the artist would have been rare. When not on duty with the army overseas, the earl spent much of his life in England, both before and after inheriting the title. Between 1786 and 1793 he was for the most part resident in Hampshire as a lieutenant-colonel on half-pay. In 1794 he was serving in Holland and in 1796, around the completion date of the Bellevue painting, he was commander of the British Land Forces in Corsica. However, he did travel to County Galway in late 1793 and stayed briefly to raise troops for the Connaught Rangers. That same period also saw the dissolution of the Irish Volunteers as a body and coincided with Walter Lawrence’s planning for his commemorative Volunteers painting at Bellevue.

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​The likelihood then is this portrait was either painted in the first half of the 1780s or perhaps in 1793. Ryan was certainly engaged over a number of years at Bellevue in the early 1790s and the earl’s presence in both the Brackloon and Bellevue paintings, together with the apparent hand of Ryan and their shared emphasis on the Irish Volunteers would suggest the possibility of some underlying connection. Though the Bellevue Volunteer painting was completed three years after the Volunteers were dissolved, it depicted an historical scene from the mid 1780s. If both paintings shared a common link and were essentially commemorative, it could account in part for the style of uniform and earlier pattern of sword seen in the Brackloon portrait.

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The artist's fastidiousness over the earl's uniform did not extend to the landscape behind. The earl leans against a cannon but over his shoulder is an amalgam of poorly-defined architectural forms. If not an attempt at an existent collection of buildings, it may simply be the imagining of a far-flung landscape by a less than well-travelled provincial artist.

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Despite his early incidental association with the Irish Volunteers, Clanricarde in later years was an active supporter of the Act for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, which resulted in the abolition in 1801 of the Irish parliament. In return for his services, it was claimed he sought, unsuccessfully, to be raised to the rank of marquis, a title extinct on the death of his older brother and only revived later for this earl's son. He was, however, elected as one of the original twenty-eight Irish representative peers to the new British House of Lords in 1800 and succeeded in having the earldom recreated to allow for his title to descend through a female line in the eventuality of an absence of male heirs.

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The earl only married after inheriting the title in his fifties but went on to have a number of children prior to his death in 1808. On the death in 1916 of his grandson, the last de Burgh Marquis of Clanricarde, most of the latter’s vast property, wealth and his art collection was inherited by the Earls of Harewood. This portrait hung for some time thereafter alongside that of his brother and others on the White Staircase at Harewood House in Yorkshire. At least two of the Clanricarde portraits were sold in 1951 and Romney's portrait of the earl's mother in 2014. However, the Brackloon portrait would appear to be the first of the family portraits to return to County Galway, the ancestral home of the Clanricardes, since the death of the last Marquis.