James Cavenagh Murphy (1760-1814) was born into a humble family in Blackrock, near Cork, Ireland. He was a bricklayer but had considerable talent for drawing and caricature. When this was recognised, he was given the chance to go to Dublin to study drawing and painting, and later architecture.
Employed by William Conyngham in Dublin, Murphy was sent to Portugal to draw the Dominican Batalha Monastery, said to be one of the best examples of the Gothic style in the country. He disembarked in Porto on 8 January 1789, having spent three days at anchor in the Douro as the river’s turbulence made it impossible for customs officials to visit and passengers to disembark. There he obtained a letter of introduction to the Prior of Batalha from an English merchant, making a 7-day journey to the monastery, including a stop to visit the university at Coimbra, in a small chaise pulled by mules. He stayed in Batalha for 13 weeks, much of which he spent measuring and drawing the building. However, his non-stop efforts led to illness and he was not impressed with his doctor. Initially the friars had been suspicious of Murphy but he seems to have won them over and left with a certificate of his good conduct, under the royal seal of the monastery.
Batalha was followed by a tour of the centre of the country for the rest of 1789, beginning with the Marinha Grande glass factory, where he stayed with the British owner, William Stephens. He stayed for three weeks at the monastery of Alcobaça before making his way to Vila Franca de Xira and catching a boat down the Tagus to Lisbon. His drawings there included some of the Praça do Comércio, showing that it has changed little since he was there. Other places he visited included the British cemetery. One of his many interesting observations of Lisbon was that the servants in private houses were all from Galicia. Another was that when visiting the homes of others the gentry were obliged to go by coach. No one would be considered a gentleman if he arrived on foot. After Lisbon he visited Sintra and Mafra, before heading to Évora.
In 1790, he returned to the British Isles, and began preparing the publication of the drawings, accompanied by an introduction in which he discussed the foundations of Gothic architecture and provided a translation of part of the history of St. Dominic by Frei Luís de Sousa. Murphy’s work, entitled Plans, Elevations, Sections and Views of the Church of Batalha, was published in instalments between 1792 and 1795, and was very popular, a fact evidenced by the lists of subscribers published at the end of the instalments. Among these were the Portuguese Prince Regent and the British monarchs, Horace Walpole, James Wyatt, and William Beckford. His work would be the inspiration for the publication of a series of detailed surveys on Gothic buildings in England.
In 1795, Murphy published Travels in Portugal, an illustrated diary of his trip to Portugal, which he hoped would provide him with a pension in his later years. In 1799 he returned to Portugal, seeking a patron to support a project to survey other old buildings. By 1801 he was experiencing financial difficulties that eventually led him to Spain where, in Seville and Córdoba, he would collect material for two other drawing projects, this time on antiquities and the history of Arab Spain.
Generally accused of being a poor writer, Murphy was nevertheless an extraordinary man. His work in Batalha provided an invaluable record of the monastery, which was to suffer the demolition of numerous buildings in the 19th century. He also provided us with written information about the Batalha community and life in the convent. He died in 1814.
Sources: Mosteiro da Batalha, James Murphy and A.H. Norris, A Visitor to Portugal in 1789, BHSP Annual Report 2, 1975.
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