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Life
1729-1817 [var. ?1730]; visited Ireland with Angelo Maria Bigari in 1750 and was patronised by Vallancey and William Burton Conyngham of Slane Castle, 1760-1790; left a large number of notebooks with water-colour sketches of Irish antiquities, now divided between the National Library of Ireland (MS 1958 TX) and the RIA; the figure in a long red riding-coat with a cocked hat appearing in some of these is thought to be a self-portrait; Sir William Wilde quotes at length from Beranger’s journals of extensive tours in Ireland, now lost.
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Works
Peter Harbison, Beranger’s Views of Ireland (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy 1991), 111pp.; Peter Harbison, ed., Drawings of the Principal Antique Buildings of Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press 1998), 228pp. [in collaboration with NGI]; Peter Harbison, Our Treasure of Antiquities: Beranger and Bigari's antiquarian sketching tour of Connacht in 1779: based on material in the National Library of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy (Wicklow: Wordwell/NGI 2002), xi, 237pp.,ills. [photos. by Josephine Shields].
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Commentary
Sir William Wilde called described Beranger as ‘spare in person, of middle height, his natural hair powdered and gathered into a queue; [...] a clear, observant, swuare-ended nose, tha nuffed humbug and took in fun; clear, quick, brown eyes; a well-cut dramatic mouth, eloquent and witty’. (Quoted in Eileen Battersby, review of Our Treasure of Antiquities, in The Irish Times, 14 Dec. 2002, Weekend.)
George A. Little, Dublin before the Vikings (Dublin: M. H. Gill 1957), contains a drawing by G[abriel] Béranger illustrating ‘The Old Tower of Michael of Pole, Dublin’ (p. 109, facing). The text remarks that monochromes of the scene were made by him in 1766 and 1775. Little makes it clear that the picture involves an inaccuracy in so far as the building attached to the tower is not a church but the school of a teacher called Jones, with permission to built against it so as to use the stairs to access his second floor. Cf. Little, ‘The provenance of the Church of St Michael de le Pole’, in Dublin Historical Record, 12, 1 (Feb. 1951), pp.2-13.
Peter Harbison, Béranger’s Views of Ireland (Dublin: RIA 1991), 111pp.; notes that Sir William Wilde seems to have had access in the 1870s to Beranger’s journals of extensive tours in Ireland, now lost, and quoted at length; b. 1729 came to Ireland at 21 patronised by Vallancey and William Burton Conyngham of Slane Castle, between 1760 and 1790; left a large number of notebooks with sketches, held in National Library and RIA Library, which show a not very inspired but conscientious topographer; the figure in a longskirted red coat, cocked hat, who appears in some of his copies presumably himself.
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Notes
Charles O’Conor was host to Béranger at Belangare, the latter having been sent to him by the antiquarian Col. Burton O’Conor reported in a letter to Thomas O’Gorman: ‘I attended them to Roscommon, where they took plans and elevations of the abbey built by my own family and the castle build by Ufford, the Lord Deputy, to bridle that family as they richly deserved by their contumacy in keeping possession for a long time of the lands they were born to.’ (See Robert Ward & Catherine Ward, eds., Letters, Washington: CUA 1988, p.403.)
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