Peter Harbison reviews a collection of Beranger watercolours recently presented to the Royal Irish Academy
It could never be claimed that Gabriel Beranger was a great artist, yet his pictures present us with many charming and very informative views of Ireland’s historic monuments as they were around the 1790s. Beranger was born of Huguenot stock in Rotterdam around 1729, and came to Ireland some twenty years later, ostensibly to marry a cousin and thereby unite two separate branches of the family. He seems to have been happy to spend the rest of his long life in Dublin. The death and burial of his wife around 1782 is recorded on a large wall slab in the Huguenot cemetery in Dublin’s Merrion Row; en secondes noces, Beranger married a rich lady who allowed him to live a life of pleasure, if not of luxury. In 1817, Beranger himself was laid to rest in Dublin’s Peter Street Cemetery, whose human contents were removed many years later to Mount Jerome, with only a bronze wall plaque to mark the site where the city’s Huguenot cemetery had once existed.
Stephanie McBride explores Deirdre Brennan’s photographic response to James Joyce’s Ulysses