By Colum Kenny
This fine watercolour of Sandycove Point, Co. Dublin, from the Dún Laoghaire side recently came to light at Adams Auctioneers. It includes ‘Joyce’s Tower’, as that structure is known today. Matthew Fortescue, part-time painter and otherwise an engineer with Guinness, dated it ‘1922’ beneath his signature.
We thus see in colour how the place looked in the very year that James Joyce’s Ulysses was published. That year too the Irish Free State came into existence. Clearly visible is Neptune Lodge, with its distinctive red roof. In 1937 the distinguished architect Michael Scott was to design and build ‘Geragh’ next to Neptune Lodge. Joyce’s Ulysses opens on top of the tower, as ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed’.
Matthew Fortescue (1866–1925) was the first child of Joseph Fortescue (1833–99) of Kent, England, and Sarah Jane Mason. Joseph’s father was a judge and Sarah’s was a Northumberland clergyman. By the age of twenty Joseph had emigrated to Canada, where in 1852 he joined the Hudson Bay Company as a clerk and rose within it to become chief factor at its oldest post in the area of York Factory, Ontario. His son Matthew was born there in 1866 and was the first of eleven siblings.
Matthew appears to have come to Ireland first to study for a university degree. On 12 June 1889 he married Prudentia Butler at Rathmines, Dublin. By that date he was a student at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received a BA degree in 1890 and the BAI (engineering) degree the following year. He left again to work for the Canadian Pacific Railways but settled in Dublin from about 1900.
Fortescue clearly painted delicate watercolours, and it is surprising that no more than a handful have come to light. One has been described as ‘an unusual and fascinating’ view from Killiney Hill, Co. Dublin, looking down on Dalkey Island, Sorrento Terrace and the Vico Road in 1906.
In 1916 Fortescue sought £5 compensation from an official Property Losses (Ireland) Committee that had been set up after the Easter Rising. He stated that his watercolour ‘On the River Dart, Devonshire’ had been destroyed by fire at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Lower Abbey Street ‘during the recent unfortunate rebellion’.
Matthew and his father traced their lineage back many generations through an old Devon family to Sir John Fortescue (1395–1485), sometime lord chief justice of England and author of De laudibus legum Angliae, a classic English legal treatise. They were thus also related, very distantly, to the Fortescue family of County Louth. One of his sisters served as a nurse in the First World War and died off the Irish coast on 27 June 1918 when the ship Llandovery Castle, to which she was then posted, was torpedoed by the Germans and sank south-west of Fastnet. Matthew surely thought of her when he looked out to sea while painting his watercolour of Sandycove.
Colum Kenny is Professor Emeritus, DCU. His most recent book is Dangerous ambition: the making of Éamon de Valera (Eastwood, 2024).