Irish Castle Paintings, Abbeys and Round Towers in Art: Petrie, Roberts and the Painters of Ruins

The best Irish castle paintings, abbey views and round tower pictures were mostly made by people who cared as much about the stones as the scenery. From Francis Place sketching Kilkenny ruins in 1698 to George Petrie drawing round towers in the 1820s, Ireland's ruins were drawn first as records and only later as romance, and that mix of accuracy and atmosphere is what makes them so good to live with.

This guide walks through the painters who recorded Ireland's castles, abbeys and round towers, what to look for in each, and which prints work on a wall today. For the wider range, start with our Irish art prints.

Francis Place: the first look, 1698

Francis Place was an English artist from York who toured Ireland in 1698 and 1699, travelling from Drogheda to Dublin, then to Kilkenny and on to Waterford before sailing home. He recorded what he saw in pen and wash rather than in a diary, and he had antiquarian interests, so ruins caught his eye. His Irish drawings were auctioned in 1931 and most were bought by the National Gallery of Ireland in 1972.

His Ruins near Kilkenny, possibly St John's Abbey, is small and plain: roofless walls, a round-headed doorway, hard sunlight. It is one of the earliest surviving views of an Irish ruin by an artist who went to look at it in person.

Thomas Sautelle Roberts: castles on the rivers of the south

Thomas Sautelle Roberts was born in Waterford around 1760, the son of the architect John Roberts and younger brother of the landscape painter Thomas Roberts. He trained first as an architect, which shows in how carefully he builds a castle wall. Between 1795 and 1799 he issued twelve aquatint views of Ireland for a larger series that was never completed, and in 1823 he was among the first members of the Royal Hibernian Academy.

His subjects are the great river sites of the south: Lismore above the Blackwater, Blarney and Blackrock in Cork, the Ormond castle at Carrick-on-Suir, and the Cistercian ruin at Dunbrody on the Barrow estuary. They are full of small life, with fishing nets drying, sheep grazing and travellers resting, so the ruins never feel abandoned. More of his work is in the Thomas Sautelle Roberts collection.

George Petrie: the man who settled the round tower question

George Petrie, born on Dame Street in Dublin in 1790, is the central figure here. He trained at the Dublin Society's drawing school, drew many of the views for the illustrated Irish guidebooks of the 1820s, and from 1833 worked in the topographical department of the Ordnance Survey, recording place names and antiquities across the country. He has been called the father of Irish archaeology.

His essay on the origin and uses of the round towers, published in 1845 in The Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, argued that the towers were built by the early Irish church as belfries and places of safekeeping. Before that, writers had credited them to pagans, fire-worshippers and even Phoenicians. Petrie's view has broadly held ever since.

That scholarship shows in his watercolours. His Clondalkin Round Tower of 1819 is exact about the tower and gentle about everything around it. His Monaincha Abbey of 1829 frames a small Romanesque church that was once an island pilgrimage site in a Tipperary bog.

His best-known picture is The Last Circuit of Pilgrims at Clonmacnoise, in which pilgrims move slowly through the monastic ruins on the Shannon, past the round tower and the high cross, as the evening light goes. It is the point where Petrie the recorder and Petrie the painter meet. The full set of his work is in our George Petrie collection.

Dermod O'Brien: Trim Castle in 1938

A century later the approach had changed. Dermod O'Brien, President of the Royal Hibernian Academy, painted Trim Castle in County Meath in 1938, and the picture is now in the National Gallery of Ireland. Trim is the largest Anglo-Norman castle in Ireland, and O'Brien paints it as a solid presence above the Boyne under a wide Meath sky, not as a picturesque wreck.

Castles painted now

Contemporary painters still come back to the ruins, especially on the coast. Barra Ó Maoláin's Dunluce Castle catches the broken outline on the north Antrim cliffs in acrylic inks, looser and more about weather than masonry. There is more of his work on the Barra Ó Maoláin artist page.

Choosing a castle or abbey print

The early views by Place, Roberts and Petrie are small, delicate works on paper, and they look best at modest sizes with a wide mount and a thin frame, in groups of two or three. A run of Petrie's 1819 views works well along a hallway or up a stairs. O'Brien's Trim Castle and contemporary pieces like Dunluce can take a bigger size and a heavier frame over a fireplace or sofa.

The simplest rule is to pick a place that means something: the abbey near the home place, the castle you passed on every school trip, the round tower you can see from the motorway. These pictures were made by people who went and looked, and they are at their best hung by people who know the place.