Best of times, worst of time

Abstract

James Malton’s twenty-five engravings of Dublin were first published in London between 1792 and 1797, appearing at intervals in batches. The young Malton had been trained as an architectural draughtsman, coming to Dublin in the early 1780s to work for James Gandon (or so we are led to believe). Certainly the artist knew the city very well by the time he embarked on his great project: a series of views of Dublin, celebrating its architectural transformation. He did the necessary fieldwork in the course of 1791, choosing sites and making the set of original drawings on which his great work would to be based. These drawings, which he brought back to London, do not survive, but from them he produced both a number of luminous watercolours and his series of remarkable aquatints, the quality of which owes not a little to the fact that Malton carried out the engraving process himself. We can assume that much of the topographical detailing and finely proportioned representation of buildings and streetscapes were already there in his drawings, reflecting both his architectural training and his close encounters with Gandon’s patrons, builders and presumably Gandon himself.