Irish Arts Review

The Restoration of Newman HouseAuthor(s): Christine CaseySource: Irish Arts Review Yearbook, Vol. 10 (1994), pp. 111-116Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20492775 .

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

THE RESTORATION OF NEWMAN HOUSE

Numbers 85 and 86 St Stephen's Green are two of the best and most original

Georgian townhouses in Dublin, one a sumptuous residence of 1738, the other a later Georgian house of 1765. By good for tune this important pair of buildings were united in common ownership in the mid nineteenth century. Their combination offers a unique opportunity to view in one property the development of Dublin domestic architecture during the course of the eighteenth century and illustrates par ticularly well the dramatic stylistic evolu tion of Irish plasterwork during the period. Since 1989 these houses have undergone extensive restoration which has revealed

much about their original appearance and about their development during the course of two centuries.

History A fresh look at the documentary sources for the history of Newman House has added to and significantly amended the traditional account of their construction and ownership. Number 85, the smaller and earlier of the two buildings, was for

merly believed to have been built to the designs of Richard Castle for Hugh

Montgomery of Derrygonnelly, County Fermanagh. I

A closer inspection of the title deeds for Number 85 St Stephen's Green and relat ed properties suggests that the builder of this house and Mr Montgomery of Fermanagh were two separate individuals.2 Captain Hugh Montgomery who began building Number 85 in 1738 and who died in 1741 was the only son of Sir Thomas

Montgomery, a lawyer of the Middle Temple who received a knighthood in 1686.3 In 1702 Sir Thomas Montgomery owned extensive lands in the town of Drogheda where he was then resident.4

By 1725 Hugh Montgomery had inherit ed his father's County Louth properties and held a commission as a captain in Colonel Hayes' regiment of foot.5

In March of 1738 Hugh Montgomery leased from Abel Ram 'a piece or parcell of ground lying on the southside of St Stephen's Green in Dublin adjoining the house then lately built by Capt Corneille containing in the front to said Green sixty one feet or thereabouts'.6 The plot was number 12 in the original Corporation allotment of 1664 when it had been set to one Arthur Eccles 'gentleman'.7 Bounded on the north by the Green and on the south by Leeson's Fields, it was adjoined

Newman House, University College, Dublin, has recently

been splendidly restored. Christine Casey reveals new

information on the history and conservation of this elegant Georgian house.

, a l~~~~~~~~~~~v

Newman House, 85-86 St. Stephen's Green

on the east by the house of John Corneille, second engineer of the Kings Works in

Ireland, and on the west by a vacant plot also owned by Abel Ram. On 8 February 1741, the site 'together with the messuage lately built thereon by Hugh Mont

gomerie' was sold to Mr George Johnston by John Lyons and Charles Caldwell, executors of the 'last will and testament of

Hugh Montgomerie late of the said City'.8 Captain Montgomery, 'a gentleman of great honour and veracity' had died on 29

April 1741 from 'a deep decay' and 'after a

lingering illness'.9 He was survived by a sis ter Dorothea, whose husband John Lyons

was one of the executors of the will. Dorothea's second son Hugh Lyons later assumed the name Montgomery and inherited his uncle's estate. 10

Hugh Montgomery's elusive career and

untimely death are rendered all the more

intriguing by the great quality of Number 85 St Stephen's Green. By comparison

Number 84, the house of Captain John Corneille, has simple wainscoted interiors and modest room cornices which serve to highblighbt the- grandiose plan and4 opulent

ineirdcoaino isegbu'

house. While there is no documentary evi dence for the attribution of Number 85 to Richard Castle, the character and distinc tion of the building would suggest the involvement of an accomplished designer.

The use of a spiral service stair is seen elsewhere in Castle's work as is much of the decorative detail in Number 85. With the Castlehume link no longer tenable, evidence for Castle's authorship is neces

sary in order to sustain this attribution. Whatever the identity of its designer,

the grandeur of Number 85 is undisputed. The house is a miniature Palladian palazzo of two stories and an attic over a basement with an impressive stone frontage to St Stephen's Green. Approximately forty feet wide, the house is compact in plan with four principal rooms on the ground floor and three on the piano nobile. The entrance hall is the largest interior on the ground floor and is simply wainscoted with plaster panels above, and a black and white flagged marble floor. Off the hall is the Apollo Room, an diminutive interior

with a remarkable figurative plasterwork scheme by the Lafranchini brothers de picting Apollo and the nine muses. The principal stair of Number 85 is an early instance of the use of mahogany in a

Dublin house and is carved with Tuscan balusters and ornamental tread-ends.

The grandest and most consciously architectural interior in the house is the Saloon on the first floor, which at 35'x20' fills the entire breadth of the building.

Grandeur of scale and proportion are here combined with rich interior articulation and ornament. A pair of Corinthian door cases on the inner wall lead to the stairhall and an ante-chamber, statue niches artic ulate the end walls of the room and the elevation to St Stephen's Green is richly expressed by a Corinthian order raised on pedestals framing a central Venetian win dow and sash windows on each side. The coved ceiling is decorated with an ambi tious figurative scheme by the Lafranchini.

In 1755 the house was purchased from George Johnston by Richard Chapel Whaley who also acquired the adjoining

site, and in 1765 began building Number 86 St Stephen's Green, a much larger and more grandiose house. II Evidently inspired by Charlemont House, the designer of

Number 86 is unknown, though the invol vement of Robert West is likely. Very large and very grand, the house contains elaborate rococo plasterwork and joinery. The hall is flagged in limestone and

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

THE RESTORATION OF NEWMAN HOUSE

Portland stone and, though much altered in the nineteenth century, retains two

Doric doorcases on the inner wall, an

enriched Doric cornice and a hybrid foli ate frieze. The former dining-room was the principal ground-floor reception room of the Whaley house, and was modelled upon

the 'French room' of Charlemont house.'2 Its walls are decorated in Louis XV fashion

with large rectangular panels flanked by tall thin panels and oval medallions, and foliate ornament inside and around the

panel frames. The stairhall is among the most impressive domestic interiors of its date in Dublin richly ornamented with panels of varied size and profile containing

in and around them a wealth of rococo ornament including strapwork pendants, cornucopiae, musical instruments and the famous birds of the Dublin school. The

first floor of Number 86 was designed for

entertaining purposes and contains three large reception rooms with splendid roco co ceilings which are attributed to the

school of Robert West. Though united in joint ownership dur

ing the lifetime of Richard Chapel Whaley, the houses were later separated when Number 85 was sold, and it was not

until 1865 that the properties were again joined. In 1854 the newly-established

Catholic University of Ireland received its first students in Number 86 and in 1865 it

acquired Number 85 from the family of the

late Judge Nicholas Ball. University Church was built under the direction of

John Henry Newman, the first rector of

the new University and the Aula Maxima

was begun in 1876 to the designs of J J

McCarthy. During the course of the nine

teenth century Number 85 was consider

ably altered by successive occupants of the house. The early nineteenth-century remodellings may be attributed to George La Touche who purchased the house in

1818 and to Judge Nicholas Ball who lived

here from 1830 to his death in 1865. Further alterations were made to the

house by the Catholic University in con

junction with the building of the Aula Maxima from 1876 to 1878 and later in a refurbishment of 1939-40.

These combined buildings, which were later to become known as Newman House, served during the nineteenth century as

the premises of the Catholic University,

and, later, of its successor University

College. In 1912 the construction of a new purpose-built university building at Earls fort Terrace removed the St Stephen's

n~

Section of orinal architrave discovered during restoration.

Green buildings from the centre of College life and during the 1920s and 1930s they steadily declined. A rehabilitation pro gramme of 1939 cleverly adapted the

building for the social activities of the

University and remodelled the basement as a restaurant annex'to Earlsfort Terrace.

The purpose of the 1939 building project was to consolidate the fabric of the houses and ensure their continued use by the

University. It was characterised by utili tarian measures such as the removal of

original joinery, replacement of floors, pouring of cement throughout the base ment and insertion of new concrete and metal stairs.

moved to a new campus at Belfield, Newman House was again underused and

sorely in need of rehabilitation. At that

time, despite an increasing appreciation of Irish Georgian architecture, no eigh teenth-century house in the city had yet been restored or opened to public view. Conscious of the great quality of Numbers 85 and 86 and of the building's important literary and historical associations, the

College decided that a role within her

itage-based tourism would be the most

appropriate new use for Newman House. In 1989 a programme of restoration was initiated whose aim was to restore the

building's eighteenth-century interiors while preserving something of the spirit of the University during the days of New

man, Hopkins and Joyce. The restoration pnroramme was jointly devised by Alistair

trowan, fomeasrPoessorh of the Historyl of

Art at University College Dublin and David Sheehan of Sheehan and Barry, Architects, under the direction of Sean Brennan, UCD's Buildings' Officer. Valuable help and advice have been received from David Griffin of the Irish

Architectural Archive, Dr Edward McPar land of Trinity College Dublin and Des

mond Fitzgerald, the Knight of Glin.

Restoration Current approaches to architectural con servation range from extreme reluctance to remove or modify any historical accre tions to a building to a thorough-going enthusiasm for period reconstruction based on historical and stylistic principles.

Minimal intervention, though admirable in its aim to retain the rich organic poten tial of many buildings, can fail in some cases by disregarding the aesthetic poten tial of a building. For instance, an ugly

Victorian draught-lobby in a handsome early Georgian entrance hall may reflect the usage of the building in the nineteenth century, but this value must be weighed against its negative impact on a rare eigh teenth-century panelled interior. Period restoration also has its pitfalls and can result in the complete removal of the his torical patina of a building. The restora tion of Newman House has endeavoured to follow a path between these approach es. While many of the utilitarian alter ations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been redressed, restoration has relied heavily on clear physical and historical evidence discovered during the course of conservation.

The Apollo Room of Number 85 clearly illustrates this approach. One of the finest stucco interiors of its date in Ireland, the

Apollo Room has suffered a radical nine teenth-century remodelling. Evidently considered too small for contemporary entertaining purposes, the room had been joined to the inner parlour of Number 85 by opening a broad elliptical archway in its rear wall, thereby destroying the Lafran chini decorative scheme. Two of the room's nine muses, masks, garlands and a group of playing putti were removed in order to accommodate the new open plan. Happily the plaster figures and ornaments were not discarded but were removed and reinstated in haphazard fashion on the

walls of the inner parlour. At a later stage the University filled in the archway with a door and stud-partition, thus reinstating the original room plan but abandoning the

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

THE RESTORATION OF NEWMAN HOUSE

plaster muses in the inner room, which, by then, had become little more than a large vestibule connecting Numbers 85 and 86.

In recognition of the great quality of the Apollo Room plasterwork, a decision was made to reconstruct the rear wall and to reinstate the displaced plaster figures. As no drawings of the Apollo Room had sur vived from the eighteenth century, the design of the missing wall was a conjectur al restoration based upon the evidence of the discarded plaster figures and the sur viving scheme in the Apollo Room. Init ially a symmetrical arrangement was pre sumed with the door in the centre and the

muses on each side. When the archway and floor coverings were removed, howev er, it was found that the original pine floorboards of the Apollo Room ran beyond the wall line on the left-hand side, thus clearly indicating an asymmetrical design. A new doorcase and wainscoting were made upon the model of existing joinery and paint-scrapes were taken to determine the original colour-scheme.

An altogether more difficult problem was encountered in the stairhall of Num ber 85, which had been even more dra matically remodelled during the nine teenth century. Initially the space had been altered by opening an archway in the

wall at the top of the stair, designed to introduce light from the stairhall into an inner parlour whose windows had been blocked up by an extension to the rear of the house. Later, even more radical re

modelling was due to the building of the new Aula Maxima, a large assembly and examination hall which was built against the eastern end of the house. Its initial effect was to block up the Venetian win dow which formerly lit the stairhall of the house. Rather more intrusive was the insertion of a flight of stairs from the first floor landing of Number 85 to a suite of new classrooms above the Aula Maxima. This necessitated the removal of the eigh teenth-century ceiling and the insertion of a new stair across the original entrance to the Saloon of the house. The stair as it ascended also cut awkwardly into the blind arcading of the upper stairhall. The results of these remodellings were most unattractive, destroying not only the spa tial character of the original stairhall but also the sense of procession up the princi pal stair to the Saloon. The nineteenth century archway and stair were conse quently removed; the eighteenth-century ceiling level was replaced upon the evi dence of surviving timbers; and the origi nal entrance to the Saloon was reinstated.

During the course of investigation in the stairhall, a number of very interesting dis coveries were made. The most surprising of these is an elliptical window placed directly above the Venetian window which had evidently been bricked-up and plas tered over when the Aula Maxima stair

was inserted. From a design perspective, the effect is odd and ungainly and further investigation is required in order to deter

mine whether the lunette is original or a later insertion. Other less perplexing dis coveries include a fragment of architrave to the original door of the Saloon which

was found embedded behind the nine teenth-century stair. This has provided the model for new joinery.

Outlines of the original plaster decor ation on the walls of the stairhall have been uncovered from beneath a modern plaster skim. Prior to the commencement of restoration the only surviving orna ments in the hall were an armorial car touche above the Venetian window, and a

pair of swags or garlands of oak leaves,

fruit and flowers flanking a second car touche on the wall at the head of the stair case. Removal of modern plaster in other areas has revealed that the swags contin ued around the entire stairhall with a large pendant drop between each pair. Using

Apollo Room, Number 85 St. Stephen's Green Stairhall of Number 85: Restoration in progress.

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IRISH ARTS REVIEW

THE RESTORATION OF NEWMAN HOUSE

impressions from the surviving swags, it will be possible to recreate this decorative scheme. Difficulty arises on the window

wall where the relationship of the swags and the lunette window are somewhat unclear.

In tandem with the restoration of the stairhall, work has begun on the grandest interior of Number 85, the Saloon. At some stage during the nineteenth century, contemporary taste for brightly-illuminat ed interiors prompted the occupants of Number 85 to lower significantly the cills of the Saloon windows, and to splay the jambs of the side windows. Cutting back the cills has resulted in a thoroughly dis jointed elevation to St Stephen's Green

where the base of the Corinthian order framing the windows stand almost a foot above the modern cill level.

Other alterations to the Saloon largely date to the 1939 refurbishment when the original floor, wainscoting and skirting were removed. At that time the niches at each end of the room were remade, and the frieze was reduced to a plain and ungainly projection at the base of the entablature. The ceiling was painted in strong greys, reds and white, a scheme

which does little to compliment the Lafranchini stucco. At an unknown date the original chimneypiece was removed from the Saloon and replaced by an early nineteenth-century chimneypiece. Evid ence for the original design has been pro vided by the Irish Georgian Society Records of 1910, and by a surviving mar ble fragment of the chimneypiece.

The studious approach to period restoration seen in Number 85 stems from a recognition of the building's rarity and

exceptional quality. While Dublin still retains an impressive complement of later eighteenth-century houses, early town houses with ambitious plasterwork interi ors are few and far between. While there were undoubtedly other houses of this cal ibre in the city during the mid-eighteenth century, these are now gone, and Hugh

Montgomery's house is therefore a most precious remnant of Dublin's Georgian past.

* * *

Number 86 St Stephen's Green was the first of these houses to be purchased by the

University and has, as a result, strong asso ciations with John Henry Newman and the origins of the Catholic University. One of the principal first-floor, reception rooms

was appropriated in 1851 as the committee room of the Catholic University, and has been known since then as the Bishops's Room. A small room on the second floor of the the house was the study and bed room of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins,

who came to the University as Professor of Classics in 1884 and who died here in 1889. James Joyce, who was a student here from 1899 to 1902, records in his early

writings glimpses of the building in its role as a small Jesuit-run University. The strength and evocative power of these associations dictated a rather different approach to the restoration of Number 86. Rather than return the Bishops' Room to a drawing room of 1765, the interior is shown in its mid-nineteenth-century form.

A fragment of early flock wallpaper dis covered behind a doorcase provided enough evidence to recreate a paper for the room. Similarly in the Hopkins room, fragments of a nineteenth-century rag

paper were uncovered and matched by blocks from a contemporary London firm.

In a period of restraint for all sectors of the economy, support for the Newman

House restoration had been generous and enthusiastic. Bord Failte and Dublin Tourism, who provided initial European Regional Development Fund funding of ?100,000, were attracted by the potential of the building as a centre of focus for

Georgian art and architecture, and as a place of considerable literary and histori cal interest. What could not perhaps have been anticipated was the enormous public interest which emerged in the task of restoration itself. The revival of tradition al crafts, the painstaking cleaning, conser vation and repair of plasterwork and join ery, and the sheer excitement of discover ing a building's inner secrets have met

with wholehearted enthusiasm from the thousands of visitors who have seen

Newman House during the course of the past three years. Convinced of the value of this activity and of its importance for the preservation of Georgian Dublin, Gallaher (Dublin) Ltd, committed a further

?400,000 to enable the restoration of the stairhall and Saloon of Number 85 St Stephen's Green. By the time these words are printed that task will be complete and a new episode in the history and restora tion of Newman House will have begun.

Christine Casey

Dr Christine Casey is curator of Newman House. University College Dublin, and joint author with Alistair Rowan of North-Leinster, volume two in the Buildings of Ireland series, to be published September 1993.

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NOTES

1. C P Curran, Newman House And University Church, Dublin 1953 p6. The second son of a captain in William Ill's army, Montgomery was a substantial landowner and a neigh bour of Sir Gustavus Hume, Richard

Castle's first private patron in Ireland. Upon his marriage to Elizabeth Armar,

Montgomery inherited the estate of

Blessingburne, and his son Hugh later

acquired the estate of Castlehume.

2. Registry of Deeds. 95/351/66772.

109/221/75651. 89/299/63294. 3. W A Shaw, The Knights of England. London,

1906. vol II, p262. No direct connection

between Thomas Montgomery and the

Fermanagh Montgomerys has as yet been

established.

4. NLI. D16, 386. D16, 259L.

5. NLI. D16, 386. Military records established

that his first commission as Lieutenant was

granted on January 29th 1722. During the

1720s and 1730s our only knowledge of

Montgomery's activities are extensions to

leases of his properties in Drogheda, in

which he is referred to as being of that town

and on one occasion of 'Ballymaladdy,

County Down', Registry of Deeds

89/299/632294. A list of the Colonels,

Lieutenant Colonels, Majors, Captains, Lieutenants & Ensigns of his Majesty's Forces ... London, 1740p66.

6. Registry of Deeds 95/351/66772.

7. J T Gilbert, Calendar of Ancient Records of the City of Dublin. Dublin, 1894, vol. iv,

p305. 8. Registry of Deeds 109/221/75651. 9. The Dublin Journal, Tuesday 5 May

-

Saturday 9 May 1741. 10. Genealogical Office, ms 107, 184-85. 11. Registry of Deeds 169/455/114565. 12. Ex. info. David Griffin. Irish Architectural

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