Lot Essay
These armorial escutcheons were commissioned following the Earl's inheritance of Adare Manor in 1824. The shields boast his descent in the Irish peerage with a name derived from the 2nd Century monarch of Ireland, Con of the Hundred Battles and his grandson Quin, who wielded the sceptre in 254. Together with the ancestral portraits and chivalric armour, these heraldically charged shields hung in the Great Gallery, which had been romantically aggrandised in the 1830s under the direction of the architect Lewis Cottingham (d.1847), author of Plans, etc. of Westminster Hall, 1822. In 1839, the antiquarian Earl, a member of the Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture, recorded that his embellishment of the Gallery with heraldic glass designed by Thomas Willement had given it the handsome air of a Cathedral. He went on to patronise A.N.W Pugin in the 1840s.