The Cobbe Cabinet of Curiosities: An Anglo-Irish Country House Museum

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This magnificent volume recounts the history of, and catalogues, one of the relatively few surviving country house museums. The museum originated with the collecting activities of Charles Cobbe, Archbishop of Dublin (1686–1765), who built for himself the country mansion of Newbridge House near Dublin. At Newbridge a room was eventually set aside to house the collection, to which successive generations gradually added natural history specimens, minerals, Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities, coins and medals, as well as the interesting fragment of an extensive Indian collection that by a twist of fate never reached the museum which otherwise it would have transformed. The collection flourished until the mid-nineteenth century, when it fell into relative neglect, being described as the ‘poor old museum’. For Alec Cobbe, then one of the little sons of the house, it was ‘the dark, locked, secret room in your own home . . . A room of mystery and ghoulish things.’ In 1959 the decision was made to clear it out in order to transform the space into a sitting-room. Only the energy and insight of Alec – today a polymathic practitioner of the arts – saved the collection from dispersal and led to its reassembly. When in 1959 Newbridge passed into the ownership of Dublin County Council and was opened to the public while remaining the family’s home, Cobbe reconstituted the museum there; later it was removed to Hatchlands Park, in Surrey, where it has been rearranged, while with characteristic Cobbe ingenuity a replica museum has been created at Newbridge.