A Vanishing World : The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne

Jesuit priest and amateur photographer, Fr Francis Browne is renowned for his images of the Titanic on her doomed maiden voyage and of everyday life in mid-twentieth century Ireland. However, much less well-known are the pictures that Fr Browne took of Irish country houses over a decade from 1946 onward. At the time, these buildings were still private properties, mostly in the hands of their original families and not open to the public. Somehow, this gentle-mannered priest gained the confidence of owners and thus unique access to their homes, free to roam with his camera around the buildings and record their interiors, at the time when they were filled with treasures accumulated over generations. In most cases, his pictures show us interiors that no longer exist or have been radically altered. Fr Browne photographed more than 50 such houses, providing us with a record of how they looked on the cusp of change. Since then, some of the buildings he visited have been entirely demolished, giving a particular poignancy to his images. Others have been sold, along with their contents, and their family histories forgotten. Only a handful continue to be owned by descendants of the people who once welcomed Fr Browne. For this book, architectural historian Robert O’Byrne has selected 20 houses, some of which may be familiar to readers, some likely to come as a revelation. They range from Shelton Abbey, County Wicklow, once the home of the Howards, Earls of Wicklow and now an open prison, to Dunsany Castle, County Meath, occupied since the early 15th century to successive members of the Plunkett family. All of these beautiful photographs display Fr Browne’s customary understanding of composition and offer a sympathetic insight into what was by then a fast-vanishing world. As with so much of his work, they demonstrate that he was a pioneer, investigating a world that had, until then, been largely unknown. This is a priceless record of the Irish country house at a critical moment in its history.