Once again, I find myself at the ruined Georgian building a few minutes’ walk from my house. I’m going to stick my neck out and say I have sketched this building more times than anyone, living or dead. Perhaps not - perhaps one of the ladies of the house in the 19th century was handy with the watercolours. I doubt any of the men were - by all accounts, they were busy being debauched, although I believe the first resident, Christopher St.George, had his heart in the right place and lobbied in London on behalf of the tenants over whose poverty-stricken lives he had dominion. After the first Mr. St. George built Tyrone House in 1789, things went rather to pot, it seems. Gambling. Debauchery. Drinking. Whoring. Ignoring one’s ensuing responsibilities.
The house stands on top of a hill just a couple of minutes’ walk from me, in south Co. Galway, and the locals still harbour resentment towards the family - two hundred years and more after its first resident. All the same, I am grateful for the ruin, as it’s the only building worth sketching in the vicinity. Everything else is built in the inelegant late 20th-century style, or the garish 21st-century style.
But Tyrone House makes up for it. All on its own, it has been my muse and my teacher for many aspects of sketching in ink and watercolour: light, perspective, proportion, drama, composition…ever since I first drew it when my then-boyfriend and I visited the site where he lived in a caravan, and on which he planned someday to build a house and rear a family (and, when I would hint in my reserved Irish way that I might somehow be involved in that dream, he would guffaw loudly in his brash English way that I was fishing for a marriage proposal).
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