Nathaniel Clements (1705 - 77): Politics, Fashion and Architecture in Mid-Eighteenth Century Ireland

This book argues that Nathaniel Clements (1705-77) was an enlightened patron of architecture, not a practicing architect, and that he influenced upper-class residential development in Dublin and popularized a particular form of Palladian ‘villa-farm’ (or modest country house) partly because of who he was - a high-ranking and well-connected government official and an arbiter of fashion and taste. The two places where his architectural influence is still strongly felt today are the high-fashion enclave of Henrietta Street, Dublin, of which he created about one-third in the period 1733-c.1740, and the Phoenix Park, of which he was Ranger, where he made important improvements to the landscape and where he built in 1752-57 a new Ranger’s Lodge which forms the nucleus of today’s Aras an Uachtarain, the official residence of the President of Ireland. The book provides a detailed analysis of these aesthetic achievements and (following Clements’ death) of the re-casting of the Ranger’s Lodge as a British viceregal residence during the period 1782-c.1800.It concludes with a broader discussion of the ‘amateur’ tradition in British and Irish architecture and of Clements’ place among the ‘amateurs’ who dominated the art form in the decades before the coming-of-age of a fully-fledged architectural profession.