January 2009

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Cooper Penrose was among the leading merchant princes of late-18th-century Cork. His family’s wealth derived from timber importing and property development, and he was also a pioneer of the city’s glass manufacturing business. A somewhat unorthodox Quaker, he alarmed his coreligionists with his taste for sheepskin gaiters, yachts and carriages and, perhaps most of all, his owner-ship of a striking nude Venus by his friend James Barry. In his home at Woodhill, Penrose created a centre of culture and liberal dissent. Of distinctly republican sympathies, he gave refuge to Sarah Curran after the execution of her lover Robert Emmet, leader of the failed rebellion of 1803. However, it was for the art that Woodhill was most famed. In the west wing, added to the 18th-century house in about 1802, Penrose laid out a gallery where his collection of Irish and European paintings and Graeco-Roman sculpture was displayed. However, his most prized possession, his portrait by David for which Penrose travelled to Paris in 1802, hung in the main house (Fig. 4). David clearly responded well to the affable Penrose, noting in his diary: ‘I will represent him in a manner worthy of us both. This painting will be a Monument which will attest to Ireland and the virtues of a good family man, and the talents of the painter who has painted it.’2

The Penrose family moved to England in 1930, taking their collection with them. There were occasional dispersals and over the years many of these were acquired by the Crawford, including Barry’s Prince of Wales in the Guise of St George; an extraordinary work by Samuel Forde, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (purchased by Penrose’s son Edward) and the famous view of the city by Barry’s master, John Butts, which just a few years ago was donated to the museum, also by the McCarthy family. The most important picture that ‘got away’ was the David, which is now among the treasures of the Timken Museum in San Diego.

The existence of the collection was forgotten in Ireland by all but that great pursuer of the country’s heritage, Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, who, from the 1980s, maintained contact with the family. Peter Murray, the director of the Crawford, negotiated the donation with representatives of the Penrose family in Derbyshire, and John and Helena Mooney agreed to acquire and donate the collection to the gallery, availing themselves of the tax relief provided for in the legislation. It has been most appropriately installed at the Crawford in three 18th-century panelled rooms not far from Penrose Quay, the heart of the family’s business (Fig. 1).

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