The Art Collection
Impressive though Russborough is, the chief reason why it is so firmly on the tourist trail is its collection of paintings . The German entrepreneur Alfred Beit (1853-1906) was a co-founder with Cecil Rhodes of the De Beer Diamond Mining Company, and he poured the fortune he derived from that enterprise into amassing works of art. His nephew, Sir Alfred Beit, acquired Russborough in 1952, which explains why such an extraordinary collection of famous pictures is kept in this obscure corner of County Wicklow. Whatever you may feel about their irrelevance to the site or the source of the wealth that made the acquisitions possible, there are some marvellous paintings by Goya, Murillo, Velazquez, Gainsborough, Rubens and Frans Hals, to name but a few. Russborough has been burgled twice: in 1974, when Bridget Rose Dugdale stole sixteen paintings to raise money for the IRA - although her booty, worth GBP18 million, was recovered undamaged from a farmhouse in County Cork a week later; and in May 1986 - some of the paintings taken in the second heist have since been retrieved in The Netherlands. Nowadays security is tight, and visitors are herded around the house in groups, with little chance to study the paintings - or anything else - in detail
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