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Official opening Sunday 6th June at 3.30pm

at

Russborough House, Blessington, Co. Wicklow

Maria Levinge
'Your voice over Parnassus, twinned with my thoughts, Learned at the same time to unleash their flight.'

So, around the time Russborough House was nearing completion, wrote mid-18th century Europe's most celebrated poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio to the era's equally famous castrato singer Farinelli. In Greek mythology, and as depicted by Raphael in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura, Parnassus was home to the Muses. Russborough, often deservedly described as the most beautiful house in Ireland, has proven a muse for Maria Levinge, inspiring her to paint more than sixty exquisite pictures.

With occasional exception, she has eschewed the grandiose in favour of the intimate. Russborough may possess the longest facade of any building on this island but despite the best efforts of the Franchini brothers' riotous stucco decoration much of its interior remains on a domestic scale.

Likewise Maria Levinge's paintings which she describes as 'little condensed essences.' Rather than presenting us with the full picture she concentrates her attention on capturing snapshots: a pair of gilt fauteuils separated by a little ornamental table; a single rococo mirror; a pedimented doorframe. These are insights into Russborough which for the majority of its visitors today might otherwise seem as far removed from their own circumstances as did Parnassus from the ancient Greeks. But the details selected by Maria Levinge make the house human, approachable, personal, a home. On the table between two chairs, for example, stands a lamp the shade of which is slightly askew, just as the red armchair in another picture has a cushion seeming still to bear the imprint of whoever last sat there.

Whatever might be found inside the walls of Russborough, however, engages Maria Levinge much less than the house's surrounding parkland.

More than three-quarters of her paintings are exterior views, once again many of them capturing features likely to elude the average eye, not least a rutted track between field and woodland to which she returned on several occasions over the course of a year’s work. The rococo style employed with such abundance throughout Russborough's interior decoration had a particular fondness for asymmetry and so does she. The greater part of one picture is taken up by a clouded sky, the image broken only by the intrusion of an upper corner of the house and its stone urn. Likewise Russborough's roofline can be seen rising over the top of an aisle in the maze while the walled garden's greenhouse is shown peeking around a rusticated outbuilding.

Through her paintings Maria Levinge demonstrates an unusual awareness of the importance of a building's context. Russborough needs its surrounding landscape: each was designed for, and would be seriously diminished without, the other and both are of equal consequence. It is probable, and quite understandable, that most painters would permit themselves to be seduced by the ostentatious glories of the house without understanding the significance of its less flamboyant setting. Maria Levinge helps us better to appreciate Russborough in its spectacular totality and as once did Farinelli she leads our own thoughts to the beauties of Parnassus.

Robert O'Byrne 2010