This picturesque landscape drawing is executed in pencil and white watercolour on paper. It is titled ‘Hermitage at Tollymore Park, Bryansford’ and is signed by Emily Charley. The youngest of seven children, Charley was born in 1837 into a respected linen manufacturing family steeped in Orangism. With one of her sisters, Emily endowed the Charley Memorial School, Drumbeg, in 1892. She died in 1917. Clearly accomplished, as evidenced by this drawing, her artistic output is not otherwise known.
The hermitage at Tollymore Park was constructed in the 1770s for James Hamilton, second Earl of Clanbrassil, in memory of his friend John Montagu, Marquess of Monthermer, who died in 1770 aged just thirty-five. Standing on a natural rocky outcrop above the Shimna River, it was described in 1823 as ‘a huge mass of rough stones piled up together and forming, in the interior, a chamber 12 feet by 8 feet, with a sort of arched doorway on each end’. While the main structure is largely obscured by vegetation, one of the arched doorways is clearly depicted in Charley’s view, as is the narrow approach path with its rustic wooden fence and the supporting arch beneath the main chamber. Also clearly visible is a nineteenth-century suspension bridge. As Charley shows, this narrow footbridge consisted of chains holding iron uprights on which were laid planks to form a walkway. Previously thought to have been first documented in 1859, Charley’s drawing shows the bridge to have been in place at least five years earlier. It was demolished in 1936 and replaced by a wooden bridge 100 metres downstream. The hermitage remains, much as Charley shows it.
This drawing was acquired by the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland (FNCI) in 2011 and donated to the IAA. The FNCI is a charitable body established in 1924 to acquire works of art and objects of historical interest and donate them to archives, galleries and museums throughout Ireland. The IAA has benefitted from the FNCI’s generosity on several occasions and to celebrate the FNCI’s centenary an exhibition of all the items added to the IAA collections by the FNCI – including Emily Charley’s view of the Tollymore hermitage – will run in the Architecture Gallery, 45 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, from 12 April to 30 August 2024.
