Russborough House

Set in 200 acres of Wicklow parkland south of Dublin, backed by the gentle slopes of the Wicklow mountains, Russborough House extends 213 metres from end to end — one of the longest house frontages in Ireland. It is a measured, stately Palladian composition in grey Wicklow granite, built for a man who had recently made a large fortune and wanted the world to know it. The house is beautiful, the setting is serene, and its recent history involves more armed robberies than almost any other building in Europe.

Richard Cassels, also spelled Castle, was German-born and arrived in Ireland around 1728. He became Ireland's most prolific and accomplished architect of the mid-18th century, designing Leinster House (now the Irish Parliament), Powerscourt House and Westport House among others. Russborough, begun in 1741, was his masterpiece. The design follows Palladian principles exactly: a central house block flanked by curved colonnades, or quadrants, connecting to lower wings, the whole composition unified by the consistent use of local granite. The interior plasterwork, by the Swiss-Italian Lafranchini brothers who worked on several great Irish houses of the period, is among the finest Baroque-Rococo stucco work surviving in Ireland.

Joseph Leeson was the son of a Dublin wine merchant who had accumulated one of the largest fortunes in Ireland during the early 18th century. Joseph undertook two Grand Tours of Italy, buying paintings in Rome and Venice, and returned with a collection that included works attributed to Velázquez, Murillo, Rubens and Dutch masters. He needed a house adequate to display them, and Russborough was conceived as a gallery as much as a residence.

In 1952, Sir Alfred Beit, grandson of Alfred Beit, the diamond magnate and co-founder of De Beers, purchased Russborough and brought with him one of the most significant private art collections in the world. The Beit collection included Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, along with works by Rubens, Goya, Gainsborough and Metsu. The combination of Leeson's original acquisitions with the Beit collection made Russborough one of the finest repositories of European Old Master painting in the British Isles.

What makes Russborough unique in the annals of Irish heritage — and what must be addressed directly in any honest account of the house — is its record as the most burglarised significant house in Ireland. It has been robbed four times. The first robbery, in 1974, was carried out by the IRA under Bridget Rose Dugdale; 19 paintings were taken and held for ransom. The second, in 1986, was carried out by Martin Cahill, known as 'The General', the Dublin crime boss who later became the subject of John Boorman's film of the same name. A third robbery occurred in 1987, and a fourth in 2001. Most works were eventually recovered, though some were damaged in the process. After the 2001 robbery, the Alfred Beit Foundation transferred the most significant and vulnerable works, including the Vermeer, to the National Gallery of Ireland, where they remain on permanent loan. What Russborough displays today is consequently a portion of the original Beit collection, the rest having moved to a more secure public institution.

Russborough is managed today by the Alfred Beit Foundation and is open to visitors via guided tours, which cover the ground-floor State Rooms, the surviving Leeson and Beit collections, and the extraordinary stucco work of the entrance hall and staircase. The landscape garden, largely informal, with views of Blessington Lake in the middle distance, surrounds the house and is walkable. The formal facade is reflected in a ha-ha, a sunken boundary wall that creates an unobstructed view from the front rooms across the parkland beyond.