Cabinet collections allow us to explore “whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things hath produced,” as Sir Francis Bacon put it. That process lies behind all museums, including “the Cobbe Ark”: an 18th-century Anglo-Irish cabinet of curiosities in Newbridge, County Dublin, which is the subject of this book. The singularity of the book lies in the weight and breadth of specialist scholarship which has been marshalled to analyse what is, after all, a not unusual collection; the kind which could once be found in the houses of many aristocratic and gentry families across Europe. It is very much a family collection of natural history, antiquities and exotica, “a room of mystery and ghoulish things” for generations of Cobbes, which was cleared out to make a sitting room in 1959.
The book tells how Alec Cobbe saved the collection itself by negotiating with Dublin County Council to secure the future of Newbridge and its contents, and how he reconstituted the ark from the 1980s at Hatchlands Park in Surrey, with a replica at Newbridge. The book is a further testament to his extraordinary zeal and drive in bringing this substantially intact collection so vividly to life, along with help from Brian Allen of the Paul Mellon Centre.
Arthur MacGregor’s excellent introduction explains the forces that brought this kind of cabinet of curiosities into being, from the Irish-born Sir Hans Sloane in the late 17th century to the “antiquarian coming of age” represented by Dr Tuke’s Museum in Dublin in the 1820s. Objects of Irish interest range from a cup made of an ostrich egg from Lord Clanbrassil’s menagerie, inscribed “Laid at Dundalk 1756”, to Archibishop Cobbe’s relics of Jonathan Swift, which included a copy of Van Dyck’s portrait of Sir Kenelm Digby, bought at the sale of Swift’s effects in 1746. Also discussed are Archbishop Cobbe’s series of medals by Jean Dassier showing British monarchs; a wax model for a lithophane after Anton Raphael Mengs, catalogued by Aileen Dawson; and a set of imitation cameos or medallion wafers, expertly analysed by Diana Scarisbrick.
Typical of their caste, the Cobbes served the British Empire in India in the 19th century, a culture which Colonel Thomas Cobbe (1788-1836) knew and loved, not least through his marriage to Nuzzeer Begum of Kashmir. Colonel Cobbe probably acquired the Nepalese prayer-wheel described by Richard Blurton, while the Chinese collection perhaps derives through the East India Company connections of Charles Cobbe (1781-1857) and his brother, Thomas. Oceanic objects may have been given to the Cobbes through the recently discovered Irish connections of Captain Cook’s crews.
This is an extraordinarily luxurious publication and, while no one would cavil at the double-page spread for the antlers of a giant deer excavated near Dublin in 1684, they might wonder if the same lavishness should be expended on quite so many other objects. The individual pieces are not in themselves particularly significant. It is the ark’s survival as a whole, with its 18th-century display furniture, that makes it a rare and attractive memorial to a world we have lost.
Dora Thornton is the curator of Renaissance Europe at the British Museum
The Cobbe Cabinet of Curiosities: an Anglo-Irish Country House Museum
Arthur MacGregor
Yale University Press in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 496pp, £75 (hb)