Murphy, James Cavanah (Cavanagh) (c.1760–1814), artist, topographer, and architect, was a native of Blackrock, Co. Cork. He is known as ‘James Murphy architect’ in his published works and it is not clear when ‘Cavanah/Cavanagh’ was inserted into his name. His parentage is obscure and he seems to have started his career as a bricklayer. One anecdote suggests that his talent for drawing was spotted when he drew a caricature of his master, using a burnt stick. Through the patronage of Sir James Chatterton he visited Dublin and applied himself to the study of architecture and drawing. He may have studied at the Dublin Society Drawing Schools. By the mid 1780s he appears to have been fairly well established as an architect, as in 1786 he was entrusted, along with Robert Parke, with executing the designs of James Gandon (qv) for alterations to the parliament house in Dublin. He was also appointed master of the Dublin Society school of architectural drawing in 1786, but the decision was reversed in favour of Henry Aaron Baker (qv).
Murphy struck up a friendship with William Burton Conyngham (qv), teller of the exchequer, landowner, and antiquary, and this had an important effect on his career. Conyngham had a fascination with Moorish Gothic architecture and had produced an album of sketches during his tour of Portugal in 1783. Noticing Murphy's gift for drawing and his interest in ancient buildings, Conyngham commissioned him to make a set of detailed drawings of the celebrated fourteenth-century royal monastery of Batalha, Portugal. Murphy arrived in Oporto in January 1789 and proceeded to Batalha, where he stayed as a guest of the prior. He spent thirteen weeks surveying the entire structure of the monastery in minute detail, using rudimentary instruments and flimsy scaffolding, before making a sketching tour of the architecture and the local people in several provinces such as Estremadura and Alentejo. In October 1790 he made a quick tour of England, visiting a number of key towns such as Liverpool, Manchester, and Chester. One surviving sketchbook shows that he had a keen eye for modern technological developments. At Worsley, near Manchester, he made a sketch of an ingenious water-powered machine for making mortar, which if replicated would have been of great use to his bricklayer friends in Ireland.
In 1795 he published Plans etc., sections & views of the church of Batalha along with a history and description of the monastery (which he had translated from a text originally written by Luis de Sousa) and a discourse on the principles of Gothic architecture. One of the sources that he cites suggests that an Irishman, David Hacket, was the architect of the monastery in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. This imperial folio-sized volume was printed on the highest quality paper and sold for £4. 14s. 6d. (£4.725), making it one of the most expensive architectural books on sale at the time. He included a portrait engraving of his patron and notes that Conyngham ‘spent upwards of £1,000 on the task of bringing out this volume’. The twenty-seven plates, showing all the elevations and internal layout of the church along with precise measurements (engraved by W. Lowry and others), rank among the finest architectural engravings of the eighteenth century. Among the subscribers of this lavish volume were twenty-four architects, including Richard Morrison (qv), James Wyatt, George Dance, and John Soane. Though some of Murphy's ideas about the origins of Gothic architecture were disputed at the time, it seems highly likely that this volume would have provided inspiration for the ‘Moorish Gothic’ style of architecture that was used on garden buildings and ornamental ceilings in the early nineteenth century. In 1795 he also published Travels in Portugal, which included engravings of important public buildings such as the custom house in Lisbon, as well as Roman antiquities and scenes of peasant life (a version in German of this folio was also published at the same time). This theme was continued in his General view of the state of Portugal containing a topographical description thereof (1798), which contained fifteen aquatint-type plates of the landscape and village scenes.
Though Murphy always styled himself as ‘architect’ in his published volumes, nothing is known about his building work. He is listed as one of the seven architects appointed to advise on the conversion of the parliament house, Dublin, to a bank after the act of union, but does not seem to have clinched any major commissions. In 1802 Murphy set sail for Cadiz and spent seven years living in Spain. He worked obsessively learning about the history, language, and architecture of the country and for a short spell worked as a diplomat on behalf of the royal court in Portugal. On his return to England in 1809 he corresponded with the admiralty about a method for preventing dry rot on ships (but these plans came to nothing) and set about writing further volumes based on his travels on the Spanish peninsula. Two volumes were published shortly after his death: Arabian antiquities of Spain (1815), a folio with ninety-eight plates, and a companion volume, The history of the Mahometan empire in Spain (1816), which chronicles the conquests, topography, principal seats, and sciences cultivated by the Arabs. A second edition of Batalha was published in 1836, and in the 1840s it was among the prize books given to students at the Dublin Society Drawing Schools.
Murphy's contribution to the Gothic revival in England and Ireland has been largely forgotten. The early nineteenth-century preoccupation with the neo-Grecian style meant that Murphy's pioneering works on Moorish architecture and culture in Spain and Portugal received less attention than they deserved. It is also possible that contemporaries considered him to be at the fringes of the architectural establishment; he came from a very humble background and dared to question existing theories about the origins of the ‘pointed arch’ in Europe. His criticism of Gandon's custom house, Dublin, show that he was not afraid to speak his mind. It is also odd that his appointment in November 1786 as superintendent of the school for drawing in architecture at the Dublin Society schools (during the absences of Thomas Ivory (qv)) was overturned the following month. He seemed to receive much more recognition in Spain and Portugal and was on friendly terms with the prince of Brazil and the governor of Alhambra. Murphy died 12 September 1814 on Edward St., near Cavendish Square, London. He was unmarried and left an estate of about £5,000, which passed to his sister Hannah. Some of his papers and drawings were collected by Thomas Manly Deane (qv) and Thomas Crofton Croker (qv). A book of his watercolours is in the NLI. A portrait engraving of Murphy, based on a painting by Martin Arthur Shee (qv), along with numerous sketches of Arabian ornament, are in the Royal Institute of British Architects library, London.