The East Prospect of the Giant's Causeway
Susanna Drury (c.1698 - c.1770)
Category
Art / Drawings and watercolours
Date
c. 1739
Materials
Measurements
335 x 675 mm
Place of origin
Ireland
Collection
Springhill, County Londonderry
NT 216679
Caption
In the early 1740s, thanks to Susanna Drury, the world came to know the spectacular basalt columns that rise out of the landscape to form the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim. Her intricate, luminous paintings were the first accurate depiction of this remarkable geological feature and caused a sensation when reproduced as prints a few years later. Drury’s pictures were produced at a time of increasing scientific interest in rock formation, and geologists used her depictions to corroborate their theories of the volcanic origins of basalt. Beyond her enduring images, little is known of Drury’s life. She probably trained in London and her family eventually came to live in Ireland. She spent three months at the Causeway creating her works, painting outside on the exposed North Atlantic coast. In 1740 Drury won a prize for her Causeway landscapes from the Dublin Society. Two pairs of paintings showing the east and west prospects are known, and are now at Springhill House in County Londonderry and the Ulster Museum in Belfast. By 1744 her views had been engraved and published in London by François Vivares (1709–80) and were beginning to circulate in continental Europe. Recounting her own trip to the Causeway in October 1758 (‘I am still in amazement at the stupendous sight’), the artist Mary Delany (1700–88) compared the natural wonder in front of her with the Drury prints owned by her sister, saying, ‘the prints you have represent some part of it very exactly, with the sort of pillars and the remarkable stones that compose them of different angles, but there is an infinite variety of rocks and grassy mountain not at all described in the prints, nor is it possible for a poet or a painter, with all their art, to do justice to the awful grandeur of the whole scene’. That being said, Delany – whose intricate botanical paper mosaics would later also enrapture those who saw them – said, with much admiration, ‘I can do nothing so exact and finished.’
Summary
Watercolour on paper stretched over board on canvas, The East Prospect of the Giant's Causeway, by Susanna Drury (1698-1770), c. 1739. The east view of the Giant's Causeway in County Antrim, showing the Giants Loom at centre, with picnickers at its foot and other figures exploring the rocks at right. See also NT 216681, the West Prospect.
Provenance
Bequeathed to the National Trust at Springhill by the late Anton E.B Schefer, of Falls Church, Virginia, USA, was the son of Eileen Lenox-Conyngham who married Ernest Edward ("Ned") Schefer. Eileen's father was Reverend George H. Lenox-Conyngham. Both Drury paintings were previously in the collection of the Knight of Glin, Glin Castle, Co.Limerick. Thought to have come from the collection of the Duke of Leinster at Carton House, Co. Kildare, who acquired them in the 18th century.
Makers and roles
Susanna Drury (c.1698 - c.1770), painter
References
Conroy, Rachel, Women Artists and Designers at the National Trust, 2025, pp. 50-53