In his foreword to this exhaustive and massive anatomy and catalogue of, and commentary on, his family museum, originally at Newbridge, Co. Dublin, Alec Cobbe recounts his rescue of its disjecta membra in 1959, when still a schoolboy, and its reinstatement after he and his brother inherited the house in 1984. Because the subject is little explored, it is difficult to state categorically that Newbridge is the ideal paradigm of the country house museum, but instinct suggests that it would be difficult to find a better type specimen for description and analysis. There can, however, be no doubt that in selecting as editor Arthur MacGregor, this Society’s former Director, its owner and the publishers have gone to the ideal candidate: co-editor of the seminal The Origins of Museums (Impey and MacGregor Reference Impey and MacGregor1985), founder co-editor of the thriving Journal for the History of Collections (1989– present) and author of the magisterial Curiosity and Enlightenment (MacGregor Reference MacGregor2007), MacGregor is the acknowledged doyen of this territory.

He has assembled a formidable and well-qualified line-up of no fewer than twenty-two contributors to account for the varied and often fragmentary and / or undocumented components of the Newbridge assemblage. There is indeed something exquisitely eccentric about the unleashing of such combined expertise on disparate collectanea whose individual interest is often minor at best. But it is the ensemble that matters most and a jovial exuberance of production and design pulls all together, with innumerable excellent colour photographs by John Hammond and typographical fun based partly on the title-page of the 1837 Christie’s catalogue of the Oriental Museum of Colonel Alexander Champion Cobbe, ‘Late Political Agent in Moorshedabad’. This, with 158 lots, is reproduced in full, along with many other documents relevant to the collection, in an appendix which also lists twenty-eight books in the Cobbe library. There is a separate and lengthy bibliography and a full index.

Alec Cobbe himself, with Mark Broch, supplies the family background, while Arthur MacGregor sets the Newbridge museum in a broader context, with a particular focus on Irish collecting. The individual essays on different parts of the collection or, sometimes, a single object are followed by illustrated catalogue entries. They incorporate many fascinating disquisitions on such unlikely bedfellows as pins for the display of insects, a model for a lithophane, the manufacture of wafer seals, the bog-oak carver, Thomas Rogers, or mother-of-pearl counters. Extra illustrations are present when needed, all fully captioned, and the notes, laus deo, are at the foot of each page. The most important grouping, reflecting Cobbe military ancestors, comprises the sequence of India, Burma and Nepal (the last a single prayer-wheel, but analysed in extenso). Some contributors have been hard put to say all that much about, say, the cabinets, stone projectile tips, coins, medals, insects or geological specimens. That the original museum should have been transferred for safe-keeping to Hatchlands in Hampshire, Alec Cobbe’s English home, in a reincarnation which, as atmospheric photographs demonstrate, miraculously preserves the spirit of the original, and a ‘replica’, also illustrated, created at Newbridge, is an unexpected development. But the story is not over: Cobbe continues to supplement judiciously the museum’s riches, and his account of, say, Stuart relics descended through his wife’s Dillon ancestors or his own contributions of musicalia, including Beethoven’s eyeglasses, supplies a lively coda.

The whole is a quintessentially antiquarian project and, beyond its own fascination and delight, The Cobbe Cabinet will surely stand as both a touchstone for and a stimulus to further and wider studies of the country house museum. It is also a demonstration of the present liveliness of Anglo-Irish studies, further reflected in the superb recent exhibition, ‘Ireland: crossroads of art and design, 1690–1840’, held at the Art Institute of Chicago (12 March–21 June 2015).