Category: TCD

This Library, or rather this section of the Library, has become the final resting place for a collection of objects which is best described as random. Some of these originally formed part of a larger museum collection – the death masks for example – and some were consciously acquired to form part of our exhibitions. It is also not unusual to find that some manuscript collections – especially family papers – arrive complete with objects which must find a place in the catalogue. Spectacles, slippers, a hat with real hair attached, that sort of thing.

One of the most recent additions to the objects collection is an architectural model of the West Front of College, i.e. as seen from College Green. This has graced the offices of a number of members of Library staff for many decades; upon the retirement recently of a senior colleague,  its most recent ‘minder’, it was decided to retire the artefact and therefore it was formally accessioned so that it could enter into the next phase of its career, as a research item.

The process of accessioning required some research to be done to establish when the item came to be in the Library and it turned up a nice little story. As part of his research into the history of this Library – a very suitable Christmas-stocking filler, if we may say – former Librarian Peter Fox compiled an exhaustive list of every reference to the Library to be found among the College archives. When his book – so very suitable for Christmas – was published the author kindly gave us his notes as a resource for others interested in the subject.

Among these notes was a transcription from the Library minute book for January 1884 recording the donation of the model. It had been presented by Rev James Goodman, famous for preserving much of the traditional music of the Munster area. Goodman was the professor of Irish in Trinity and numbered Douglas Hyde and John Millington Synge among his pupils. But that is not material to this story.

Goodman’s letter which remains in the minute book indicates that he believed he was presenting something which could be linked directly – via James Gandon – to William Chambers who at that time – but no longer – was believed to be the architect of the West Front in the 1750s.

When the model was repaired in the 1980s the Conservator Tony Cains putatively dated it to the mid-nineteenth century based on the animal glue used in its construction. In an attempt to establish a firmer date, and fervently wishing it would turn out to be eighteenth-century, a visit was paid to the Irish Architectural Archive which has an interesting collection of models. The Director put paid to our ambitions by informing us that this kind of model-making tended to be a very traditional activity, the style and process remaining little changed through decades and therefore not useful for dating purposes. He also introduced the idea that our model could have been either an apprentice piece, made subsequent to the building’s completion or a model done for the sheer love of the building by an architect who like making models.

Jane Maxwell