Exterior of the National Library and Museum, Dublin
Left: The National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. Right: The National Museum of Ireland opposite it. This impressive complex was built to the designs of Sir Thomas Newenham Deane (1885-99) and his son Sir Thomas Manly Deane (1851-1933) from 1885-90. This was what earned the elder Deane his knighthood (see Curl and Wilson 227). Christine Casey describes the result as "[t]wo busy and colourful classical set-pieces that at once demonstrate their authors' discomfiture with a Palladian brief while revealing an impressive command of the picturesque" (479).
Entrance hall to the National Library
Left to right: (a) The entrance from the inside. (b) Close-up of the grand mosaic tiling underfoot. (c) One of the stained glass windows, this one celebrating Cervantes. (d) The window celebrating Homer.
Left: The elaborately carved wooden fireplace surround and tiling in the entrance hall. Right: Stairs up to the Reading Room.
Upstairs to the Library's Reading Room
Left: The lavish stone-carving at the sides of the stairway, with patterned frieze and gilding above. Right: Looking down on the magnificent Reading Room, a rotunda with a painted and gilded, clerestory-lit horseshoe-shaped ceiling. This photograph was taken by Duy Nguyen, and first posted on Flickr (many thanks!). It can be shared on the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Creative Commons licence.
After his father's death, T. M. Deane, who had been a pupil of William Burges, would go into partnership with Aston Webb, and would be knighted in 1911.
Photographs, except the one of the Reading Room, text and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee. You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. [Click on all the images to enlarge them.]
Bibliography
Casey, Christine. Dublin: The City between the Grand and Royal Canals. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005.
Curl, James Stevens, and Susan Wilson. The Oxford Dictionary of Architect. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Dictionary of Irish Architects. Irish Architectural Archive. Web. 3 September 2018.
Created 3 September 2018