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James Gandon

1743–1823

 

Although widely accepted as the greatest Irish architect, a man who put his mark on the city of Dublin's public buildings in no uncertain manner, James Gandon was not Irish by birth.

      His father was a French Protestant with mystical leanings who nearly ruined himself with experiments in alchemy.  Young James was made of more practical stuff and from an early age he educated himself in the classics, drawing, and maths.  At fifteen he became an assistant in the office of an architect, Sir William Chambers, and later became his apprentice.  A few years later, about 1765, he struck out on his own.  In 1767 he published with John Woolfe a continuation of Colin Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus, which was completed in 1771.  He won his first gold medal for architecture at the Royal Academy in London in 1768.  He continued to exhibit his drawings there between 1774 and 1780.

      In 1769 he won second prize in a competition for a design for the Dublin Royal Exchange; years later, having turned down an offer to go to Russia, he settled instead in Dublin, in 1781, to work on the new Customs House.

      There was a great deal of local opposition from the merchant classes to the cost of the new building, over which there were riots.  There was even armed opposition from residents near the old customs house further up the river.  However, it was brought to a triumphant conclusion in 1791.  By then Gandon had been asked to design an extension to the Houses of Parliament and the new Four Courts, and plan the King's Inns, the main base of Irish lawyers.

      He resigned in protest over interference with his plans in 1808 and retired from practice to a house in Lucan, outside of Dublin.  He was an original member of the Royal Irish Academy when it was established in 1785.  It was thought that when George IV, the first king of England to come to Ireland in peace, visited in 1821 that Gandon would be knighted.  But the visit passed without the old man receiving this indication of royal esteem.  However, with the admiration of his friends, Gandon had no need of royal favours.

      For many years Gandon had suffered from gout.  He died at home on 23rd December 1823.  Three days later he was buried as he had wished, in the same vault as his friend, 'the bibulous and altogether delightful antiquary' Capt. Francis Grose, in a private chapel in Drumcondra graveyard.

      Gandon's work in Dublin represents the culmination of the eighteenth-century confidence that had elevated the ambitions of Grattan's parliament.  But that was to end with the Act of Union and a more uncertain future.  In 1942, to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Gandon's birth, the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland erected a plaque to his memory in the Drumcondra church.

      In 1846 Gandon's biographer commented that Gandon was a man 'whose urbanity of heart and blandness of manner converted acquaintances into friends, rendering a long-protracted life one continued exercise of benevolence and affection'.  Gandon had made and kept a host of friends, but as Maurice Craig, the premier historian of Dublin's architecture, observed, 'even these private virtues are as nothing beside his services to architecture and to Dublin'.  Gandon was the man who did the most to create the stately appearance of the city, an appearance which has ruled and influenced the lives of Dubliners ever since.  The dignity of Dublin as the capital of Ireland is largely his creation.