This painting of A Musical Gathering was once part of the Berridge Collection at Ballynahinch Castle, Co. Galway. It comes up at Sotheby’s Old Masters day auction on July 7 with an estimate of £12,000-£18,000. Bidding for this sale which offers Flemish landscapes, Dutch marines, Netherlandish still lifes, Italian religious paintings and classical landscapes, to British portraits and historic view paintings of London, and a variety of canvases from nineteenth-century continental Europe, opens on July 1. A Musical Gathering was removed from Ballynahinch in 1924 and retained by the Berridges. In 1872 the Ballynahinch estate in county Galway, was bought by Richard Berridge, a London brewer, from the Law Life Assurance Society. In the mid 1870s he is recorded as owning over 160,000 acres in county Galway. In 1888 Bateman asserted that Richard Berridge was “the largest landowner in Ireland”. The Galway estate was purchased for sporting purposes and the Berridges built a number of fishing lodges, including those at Inagh, Fermoyle and Screebe. The estate remained in the family’s possession for only two generations. Over 70,000 acres was vested in the Congested Districts’ Board in 1915. The family retained a house in the locality and some fishing at Screebe until the late 20th century.
