Deirdre Cullen
| Biography: Deirdre Cullen graduated with an MA in Art History at UCD in 2004. While working as a guide and information officer at Castletown House, Co. Kildare, she developed a curiosity about the eighteenth-century painted decorations in Castletown’s Long Gallery and returned to UCD in 2020 to undertake a PhD on this topic. |
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| Research: Deirdre’s thesis undertakes a holistic examination of the neoclassical sensibility behind the painted decoration of the Long Gallery of Castletown House, County Kildare. Refurbished in the 1770s during the tenure of Thomas and Lady Louisa Conolly, the Gallery has long been celebrated for its unique painted decorations but has yet to be examined as an example of the neoclassical painted room as a typology. Addressing this gap, the Gallery’s arguably atypical decoration and authorship is explored and its position within the history of the neoclassical movement in Britain and Ireland is re-defined. Social and educational vectors of influence, the role of antiquity in the cultural vocabulary of Ireland’s eighteenth-century elite, and the impact of the wider enlightenment reception of the antique are considered. In a re-examination of Long Gallery’s iconography, key questions will include: What evidence is there that the Conollys intended the decorations to convey a specific message? Is the Gallery a celebration of the antique by erudite patrons engaged in scholarly exchange within an erudite social circle? Is it an evocation of Arcadia? Does it express a concern with Irish improvement and legislative independence? Is it an assertion of British identity and colonial and imperial perspectives? Or is it simply evidence of what has recently been called a ‘style of thought’ – a fashionable sign of the Conollys’ participation in an elite but off-the-shelf neoclassical culture? Given Lady Louisa Conolly’s central role in the commissioning of these decorations, the project also investigates the extent of female engagement with classical antiquity. This PhD research project was awarded a four-year Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership scholarship in partnership with the Office of Public Works in 2020. |
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| Keywords: Neoclassical culture; painted room; all’antica; iconography; Ireland’s eighteenth-century elite; decorative painters; female reception of antiquity; material culture; eighteenth-century education; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century antiquarian publications. |
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| Contact: (opens in a new window)deirdre.cullen1@ucdconnect.ie |
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| Supervisor: Associate Professor Conor Lucey |