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

‘This is the latest album of images to be culled from the astonishing Fr  Francis  Browne Collections . The images are crisp and clear, and also perfectly reproduced…the excellence of the images had been joined with an informative  and well-researched text by cultural historian Robert O’Byrne.’  The Irish Catholic

Fr Francis Browne SJ is renowned for his images of the Titanic on her doomed maiden voyage and of everyday life in mid-twentieth century Ireland. Less well-known until now are the pictures that he took of Irish country houses over a decade from 1946 onward. A Vanishing World: The Irish Country House Photographs of Father Browne contains such pictures.

The owners of over 50 of these mainly private properties gave Fr Browne unique access to their homes, and he recorded the buildings and their interiors, filled with treasures accumulated over generations.In most cases, his pictures show us interiors that no longer exist or have been radically altered. Some of the buildings he visited have been entirely demolished, and others sold, giving a particular poignancy to his images.

Architectural historian Robert O’Byrne has selected 20 houses, ranging from Shelton Abbey, County Wicklow, now an open prison, to Dunsany Castle, County Meath, occupied since the early 15^th century by the Plunkett family. These beautiful photographs offer an insight into what was by then a fast-vanishing world. This is a priceless record of the Irish country house at a critical moment in its history.

Robert O’Byrne is a writer and lecturer specialising in the fine and decorative arts in Ireland, and the author of more than a dozen books. A former Vice-President of the Irish Georgian Society, he is currently a trustee of the Apollo Foundation and the Artists Collecting Society.  His previous title with Messenger Publications is Wandering Wicklow with Father Browne (2020)