Preserved in an album in Birr Castle, County Offaly, for two hundred and fifty years, the fantastical and bizarre world of Samuel Chearnley is revealed in this the first edition of Miscelanea Structura Curiosa. In October 1745 Chearnley, together with his patron and collaborator, Sir Laurence Parsons, embarked on a project of paper architecture, producing over eighty drawings for grottoes, obelisks, pyramids, fountains and triumphal arches. If it had been published at the time, it would have comprised the first architectural treatise solely devoted to follies and garden buildings anywhere in Europe. Tragically, Chearnley died at the age of twenty-nine, shortly after dating the last of the drawings; his treatise was not published and none of the designs in the album were built.

Miscelanea Structura Curiosa
Samuel Chearnley

The present volume, a special deluxe edition, finally publishes these remarkable images in their entirety for the first time. It is an extra large book and reproduces the drawings actual size.

Chearnleys designs demonstrate a truly unique vision, with perhaps the earliest appearance of surrealism in Irish art. The drawings are full of a very Irish wit and sprezzatura. Their vomiting and urinating fountains, grotesque masks and imagery associated with the initiation rites of the Hell Fire Club, are clearly intended to parody contemporary Anglo-Irish pieties. Chearnley, freed from the constraints of bricks and mortar, allows his imagination to soar to heights of architectural fantasy unparalleled in Ireland in the eighteenth century.

The book is one of the most important contributions to Irish architectural studies in the last decade. However, its interdisciplinary approach will also make it of interest to historians of eighteenth-century Ireland, art, social and local historians. It contains essays by a distinguished team of scholars in which the drawings are explored from architectural, artistic and iconological viewpoints. The social and family backgrounds of Chearnley and Parsons, Chearnleys impact on the built environment of Birr and his relationship with contemporary Irish garden design are also discussed. An appendix assembles for the first time the topographical works of Samuels brother Anthony.

Contributors to the book are: Toby Barnard (fellow and tutor in modern history, Hertford College, Oxford); Christine Casey (lecturer in art history, University College, Dublin); Peter Harbison (honorary academic editor, Royal Irish Academy); and William Laffan (editor, Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies). All proceeds of the book go directly to The Birr Heritage and Scientific Trust. The book is priced at 85 euro, published by Churchill House Press, and will be available from July 2nd.