Castletown House Guide Wins Scholarship

Castletown House Guide wins Desmond Guinness Scholarship Award

by Catherine BerginVictory

> Long Gallery Castletown House Image courtesy of OPW > Deirdre Cullen

We are delighted to announce that our former colleague at Castletown House, Deirdre Cullen is one of two PhD students this year to be awarded the prestigious Desmond Guinness Scholarship by the Irish Georgian Society. During Deirdre’s time as a guide at Castletown, she shared her extensive knowledge and enthusiasm for this magnificent Palladian country house, especially for the beautiful Long Gallery, with both staff and visitors alike. Now Deirdre has brought this passion into her research focusing on the Long Gallery at Castletown as a rare example of the neoclassical taste for painted rooms 'all’antica' (“in the manner of the ancients”) and an expression of the intellectual and cultural worlds of Ireland’s eighteenthcentury elite. Deirdre will use the Desmond Guinness Scholarship to help fund archival research in three UK archives (the British Library, the West Sussex Record Office and Suffolk Archives), as well as to conduct site visits to key neoclassical interiors across England, from Heaton Hall in Manchester to Fawley Court in Buckinghamshire. This research will allow her to compare and analyse the Long Gallery within the genre of the painted room 'all’antica' and the wider genre of neoclassical painted decoration in Britain and Ireland. Deirdre’s research is sponsored by the Irish Research Council and the Office of Public Works. From everyone here at Castletown and the OPW we would like to wish Deirdre well in this research project!