Picturing the Country House

21st Annual Historic Houses International Conference: Picturing the Country House

From the most rudimentary sketch to the finest painting the country house has always been a source of visual inspiration. Owners, architects, designers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, conservationists, marketing departments, tourism boards, and visitors have all looked at the country house in multiple ways for different purposes.

Picturing the Country House will examine how the country house has been represented pictorially and imaginatively across the centuries, through paint, pencil, engraving, decorative art, photography, film, sound, words, and other media, including the very latest technologies.

The team at the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates has excelled itself once again with a long list of authoritative speakers: 

MONDAY, MAY 9TH 

09.30-10.40 SESSION 1
- Adrian Tinniswood: ‘I say yeah yeah’: when the country house met rock ‘n roll
- David Murphy: Martial imagery: representations of the military and the great house
- Sarah Roller: ‘The past is close to us’: how has fiction shaped perceptions of the country house?

11.10-12.20 SESSION 2
- Adrian Le Harivel: The Spilsbury Taylor sketches at the National Gallery of Ireland
- Patricia Wilson: ‘A degree of grandeur that I was not prepared to expect’: the correspondence
of Sir Joseph Paxton in Ireland
- Anne Casement: The ephemeral and the absurd, the country house through the eyes of
Lord Mark Kerr

13.20-14.30 SESSION 3

- Robert O’Byrne: The shifting lens: a century of photographing Ireland’s ruined country houses
- Andrew Tierney: Digitising Summerhill: a 3D visualisation of one of Ireland’s greatest lost houses
- Sophie Chessum: Is a picture worth a thousand words? Artist depictions of country houses

14.30-15.40 SESSION 4
- Ben Cowell: Historic Houses:  historic homes or roofless ruins? The historic house and
its associations
- Curt DiCamillo: The myth of the American country house

16.10-16.40 SESSION 5
- Hopwood DePree in conversation with Prof Christopher Ridgway

TUESDAY, MAY 9TH 

09.20-10.30 SESSION 1
- Úna Kavanagh: Visualising country houses through the Clonbrock photograph collection
- Nicola Kelly: The Irish country house: through the lens of Desmond Fitzgerald, 29th Knight of Glin
- David and Edwin Davison: A moment in time: the significance of photography in the life
of the country house

11.00-12.10 SESSION 2
- Jeremy Hill: Cultural memory in the written, aural and visual worlds of a Wexford country house
- Margaret Crowley: Royal reflections of the Irish country house
- David Hicks: Behind the faces on the canvas: early twentieth-century portraiture and the Irish
country house

12.10-13.00 SESSION 3
- Hélène Bremer: Curating contemporary art exhibitions in historic houses
- David Hartley: How do we picture our buildings?

Places:

Additional Information:

Booking Options:

•  Live two-day conference fee €60 per person
• Live two-day conference fee and conference dinner €100 per person
• Live two-day student conference fee €30 per person
• Online two-day conference fee €50 per person (the proceedings will be streamed live and will be available to re-watch for one month after the event)