Russborough House

Russborough's strength today is architectural and decorative rather than pictorial: a substantially intact Palladian shell with rococo plasterwork by the Lafranchini brothers, and a body of 18th-century French and English furniture, Irish silver and porcelain that the Knight of Glin described as the most complete set of original furnishings surviving in a major 18th-century Irish house. The paintings that made the house famous, and the target of two of the most notorious art thefts in European history, are now shown mostly at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, which holds the 1987 Beit gift in its own Beit Wing.

Russborough House was designed by the architect Richard Cassels (also recorded as Richard Castle) for Joseph Leeson, later the 1st Earl of Milltown, with construction beginning in 1741. Cassels died in 1751 before the house was finished, and the Cork-born architect Francis Bindon completed the work; the house was substantially complete by 1755. Leeson's fortune came from Dublin brewing and property development, and he used Grand Tour trips to Italy to acquire paintings, sculpture and furnishings for the new house, becoming an MP and receiving his earldom in 1763.

The building is a single long composition rather than a compact block: a central block flanked by two curved colonnades that link it to flanking pavilions, giving a facade of about 210 metres (690 feet), among the longest of any house in Ireland. Ornate rococo stucco ceilings throughout the principal rooms are attributed to the Lafranchini brothers, Italian stuccadors active in Ireland through the mid-18th century. The Earls of Milltown held the house until the widow of the 6th Earl passed it to her nephew Edmund Turton in 1914; Captain Denis Bowes Daly bought it in 1931.

Sir Alfred Beit, nephew and namesake of a co-founder of De Beers who had begun assembling a collection of European Old Master paintings, bought Russborough in 1952 specifically to house that collection. What arrived filled the state rooms with works by Vermeer, Goya, Rubens, Gainsborough and Velazquez alongside 18th-century French and English furniture, silver and porcelain, joining what already remained of the Leeson and Milltown-era furnishings.

In 1976 Beit established the Alfred Beit Foundation as a registered charity to own and manage the house and collection, and the house opened to the public in 1978, with the Beits continuing to live there alongside visiting hours. Sir Alfred Beit died in 1994; Lady Clementine Beit remained at Russborough until her death in 2005.

On the night of 26 April 1974, an armed gang that included the British heiress and Oxford-trained chemist Dr Rose Dugdale, then aligned with republican paramilitaries, gained entry to Russborough. Dugdale, using a false accent, approached a side door claiming car trouble; three armed men then rushed the house. Sir Alfred Beit later recalled that the men told the household to lie flat on the floor and that he was struck with a pistol butt when he looked up; a member of staff had a revolver held to his throat. The gang cut nineteen paintings from their frames with a screwdriver in under ten minutes, including Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, works by Goya, Rubens, Gainsborough, Ruisdael and Reynolds, together valued at around 8 million pounds at the time. A ransom demand sought the transfer of IRA prisoners to Belfast in exchange for the most important works. Gardai traced the gang to a rented cottage in Glandore, County Cork, and recovered all nineteen paintings eleven days after the theft. Dugdale was sentenced to nine years.

On 21 May 1986, Russborough was robbed again, this time by a gang led by the Dublin criminal Martin Cahill, known as the General, reported in various accounts as between roughly a dozen and thirteen strong. The Beit family was away. Eighteen paintings were taken, including the same Vermeer stolen twelve years earlier, in a haul later valued conservatively at tens of millions of euro. Recovery took years and crossed several countries: paintings surfaced in police stings in Belgium, Turkey and England, and loyalist paramilitaries from the UVF in County Armagh were found to have bought some of the works from Cahill's circle, with pieces recovered as far away as Ankara after an attempted sale of a Metsu miniature drew Turkish police attention. Sixteen of the eighteen paintings were eventually recovered. Two remained missing after the last recoveries reported by RTE in August 2002; the DiCamillo Companion's provenance record for the house identifies the pair as 18th-century architectural capricci by Francesco Guardi, with a Rubens head also outstanding at that point and later recovered. No report found in this research confirms recovery of the Guardi pair since.

The house was targeted twice more on a smaller scale: two paintings, neither of them State property, were stolen in 2001 and recovered the following year, and in 2002 the criminal Martin Foley took five paintings, all of which were subsequently recovered. On the night of 7 February 2010, a fire broke out in the attic above the west wing, most likely from faulty wiring, and destroyed about 80 percent of that wing's roof, with further damage to the first floor below; the fire service worked until 5am to extinguish it and no injuries were reported. No art was lost, because the wing had already been cleared of its contents for a restoration project that was already three months under way when the fire broke out. The repair budget rose from a planned 330,000 euro to about 1.5 million euro, most of it covered by insurance, and the wing reopened to the public in 2012 with the former Beit family living quarters converted into two self-catering holiday apartments.

Two further events changed what Russborough actually holds. In 1987 the Beits donated seventeen of the finest paintings in the collection, including works by Velazquez, Murillo, Steen and Vermeer, to the National Gallery of Ireland; An Taisce, the Irish National Trust, called it one of the greatest art bequests to any country in modern times, comparable to the Wallace Collection in London or the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood. The gift is now shown in the Gallery's Beit Wing, part of an extension designed by Frank du Berry of the Office of Public Works that had opened in 1968. Then in 2015 the Alfred Beit Foundation moved to sell nine further paintings at Christie's in London, including works by Rubens, Guardi and John Atkinson Grimshaw, to build an endowment fund for the house's upkeep; foundation chair Judith Woodworth called the sale an absolute necessity. An Taisce challenged the sale in a judicial review, arguing that only the Minister for Arts, not the National Gallery, had authority to grant the necessary export licence under 1945 legislation, and said the sale would destroy the integrity of the Beit collection; it went ahead regardless, and the foundation later reported raising more than 8 million euro toward a targeted 15 million euro endowment.

Between the two robberies and the two transfers to the National Gallery of Ireland, most of the paintings for which Russborough became internationally known no longer hang there. What remains, by the house's own published account of its collection, is overwhelmingly the decorative arts built up across two centuries by the Leeson, Milltown and Beit households: French and English furniture from the 1700s, one of the finest private collections of 18th-century silver and porcelain in Ireland, tapestries, giltwood mirrors, antique Roman sculpture, Italian Renaissance bronzes, 16th-century majolica, and a scagliola tabletop made by Pietro Belloni in 1750. The same account lists surviving paintings including a Prodigal Son series attributed to Murillo and marine views by Claude-Joseph Vernet, alongside more recent Irish and European work by George Barret, Derek Hill and Basil Blackshaw.

Writing in 2005, while the Alfred Beit Foundation's trustees were being reconstituted after Lady Beit's death, the architectural historian Desmond Fitzgerald, the Knight of Glin, called the house a rather tired old place and pressed for an imaginative plan for its future, proposing that scattered furnishings be reunited with the rooms made for them and the house developed as a teaching resource for the study of Irish decorative arts. Some of that stock-taking has since happened in the form of the 2018 refurbishment and the endowment built from the 2015 sale, though the tension between preserving the collection intact and funding the building's upkeep, visible since Lady Beit's own 1985 insistence that we really do not want to sell anything, has not fully resolved.

A first phase of refurbishment completed by 2018, costing about 1 million euro, covered rewiring, new security and smoke-alarm systems, chandelier cleaning, tapestry conservation and new lighting for the Lafranchini ceilings. Guided house tours today run hourly and take in around seven ground-floor rooms, including the Entrance Hall, the Saloon, the Tapestry Room, the Music Room and the Library. The 200-acre demesne adds a maze, a walled garden, lakeside and woodland walks, an ice house, a lime kiln, and a Birds of Prey Centre with public flying displays at weekends and bank holidays. The wheelchair lift serving the house and shop was reported out of service at the time of this research, and the house's winter programme has in the past reduced or suspended tours into early in the new year, catching at least one visitor out after they had already paid for parking expecting the house to be open.

Visitors consistently describe Russborough as one of the best-preserved Palladian interiors open to the public in Ireland, and single out the guided tours for guides who know the house, the Leeson and Beit families, and individual rooms in real depth. The parklands, walled garden and Birds of Prey Centre read as a second attraction rather than an add-on. Complaints cluster around value once the house, maze, walled garden and parking are charged separately with the total not always clearly signposted, around reduced winter opening that has caught at least one visitor out after they had already paid for parking, and around accessibility, with the wheelchair lift serving the house and shop reported out of service at the time of this research.