A Collection of Drawings of the Principal Antique Buildings of Ireland. Designed on the Spot and Collected by Gabriel Beranger. Introduction by Peter Harbison.  Dublin: RIA, 1991. Pp 111, with 47 coloured plates.. Avon buckram cloth boards, housed in publisher’s slipcase. A fine copy.

A Special Edition, One of Fifty Numbered Copies.

Gabriel Beranger was born in 1729 at Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He moved to Dublin in 1750 to join family members. During the 1760s Beranger sketched ruined and standing buildings and other sites of interest in the Dublin area. He exhibited at the Society of Artists from 1763 to 1768, contributing landscapes, sea pieces, and ‘medleys’. In 1769 he moved to South Great George’s Street, where he continued to sell prints, taught drawing, and painted flowers and birds with great accuracy.

In 1773 Beranger and his antiquarian friends made the first of their tours through Ireland, starting with County Wicklow. When William Burton Conyngham and others instituted the Antiquarian Society, Beranger and another artist, Angelo Bigari, made a tour of western Ireland in 1779 in order to make plans and drawings for the society. Many of the sketches in Grose’s Antiquities are by Beranger; and some hundreds of his drawings are preserved in the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin.