“Effecting Gentility: the self fashioning of an eighteenth century provincial Irishman

With a notable feature of eighteenth- century Irish life its lavish commensality, textiles have remained a surprisingly mute material witness. An extant linen tablecloth of Irish manufacture, woven c.1736 for John McClintock of Trintaugh in the Donegal barony of Raphoe, proffers a carefully curated assertion of provincial gentility.
Animated scenes of cock-fighting, horse-racing and mastiffs crouched in readiness for battle play out around an armorial centre-piece: a gendered display of recreation and sociability weighted by pedigree and lineage. The familial motto, Virtute et labore, articulated his flinty determination to raise his social standing. As a free-holding tenant of Lord Paisley (the soon-to-be 7th Earl of Abercorn), for whom his cousin and namesake acted as agent and his brother as attorney, he orbited, though at some distance, the patrician world. His commissioning of a rare, luxury damask tablecloth was almost certainly no wine-flushed act of frippery. Rather, a conscious crafting of public standing; one calibrated to the rural, unpolished world of parochial Ireland. Farming the tythes of Taughboyne and Ray, he petitioned, unsuccessfully, in 1755 for an agency, and though his personal social ambition was to remain unrealised in his lifetime, his son, ‘Bumper Jack’ McClintock, was married in 1766 into the Foster family of County Louth, facilitating his appointment as chief-sergent-at-arms of the Irish House of Commons. His dining table draped with his father’s damask, we can easily imagine him raising a bumper in appreciation and gratitude.