It is with great sadness that the Irish Georgian Society has learned of the death of Alec Cobbe, artist, designer, musician and collector. Truly a renaissance man, Alec studied medicine at Oxford and the London Hospital in Whitechapel. Then he retrained as a painting conservator at the Tate Gallery, later working at the Hamilton Kerr Institute and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. His technical knowledge of pigment, and his skilful reading of X-rays (an unexpected synergy from his medical training) allowed for numerous rediscoveries, with particular expertise developed in the art of Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian. Alec was also a successful artist himself, exhibiting widely and was deeply versed in the historic country house interior, working from the 1980s on some of the greatest English houses, including Petworth, Goodwood and Windsor Castle and Irish houses including Castle Coole, Castletown Cox, Castletown House, Dublin Castle, Emo Court, Hillsborough Castle and Russborough. His recently unveiled rehang of Castle Howard has been universally hailed as a triumph. In 2014 a book of a London and Dublin exhibition marked Alec’s donation of his design archive to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Cobbe family owed its fortunes in Ireland to the successful career of Charles Cobbe, who rose through the ranks of the established church to become Archbishop of Dublin. Newbridge, County Dublin – the house built to designs by James Gibbs – remains the family home (though ownership has passed to the local authority. It has been, Alec recalled, ‘the single greatest influence on my life’. The designs by Gibbs for Newbridge were rediscovered by Alec and published with Terry Friedman in ‘James Gibbs in Ireland’ (2006), a volume published in association with the I.G.S.

Recent major projects associated with the house’s architecture and collections included the cataloguing in a wonderful book published by Yale University Press of the Cobbe Cabinet of Curiosities (2014), which had been accumulated there since the eighteenth century. An extraordinary exhibition organised with the O.P.W. at Dublin Castle reunited the ‘peacock’ dinner service. Commissioned from the newly founded Worcester porcelain factory by the archbishop’s daughter-in-law (and Alec’s great x5 grandmother) Lady Betty Cobbe, but sold from Newbridge in 1920, it was acquired back by Alec over decades, piece by piece. His award-winning book, ‘Birds, Bugs and Butterflies: A Biography of an Irish Service of Worcester Porcelain’ was published in 2019.

Earlier the historic picture collection formed by Lady Betty and her husband, Thomas (with the advice of Swift’s friend, the vicar of Donabate, Matthew Pilkington) was the subject of a major exhibition in 2001, together with Alec’s own, always judicious, additions to the collection. Clerics and Connoisseurs at Kenwood House was again supported by the I.G.S. in association with English Heritage.

In addition to his art and design practice, Alec was a talented musician and a leading collector of historic keyboard instruments, chiefly with associations to the great composers, but also charting the development of instrument building in Britain and Ireland. The collection is housed at the Cobbes’ English home, Hatchlands Park in Surrey (leased from the National Trust) where it complements spectacularly the interiors by Robert Adam restored and augmented by Alec over the past forty years.

Alec was a supporter of the I.G.S. for many years, contributing a typically erudite article to our journal on Ferdinand Weber, who had travelled from Saxony to Dublin to work as harpsichord maker for Dublin’s elite, including Lady Betty Cobbe. In 2016 he hosted an I.G.S. conference at Newbridge, featuring a wide range of papers on the house’s architecture, landscape and collections, subjects which he had spent a lifetime researching. His humour, kindness and, perhaps particularly, his infectious enthusiasm will be greatly missed by an immensely wide and diverse circle of friends.

Alec Cobbe is survived by his wife Isabel, née Dillon, and their children, Frances, Tom with his wife Emmanuelle, Rose and Henry, and their grandchildren.

May he rest in peace.