The Book of Trinity College Dublin 1591-1891Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland)
History
The Book of Trinity College Dublin 1591-1891
Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland)
Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland)
The Examination Hall, or Theatre, as it is more correctly called,
was designed by Sir William Chambers in 1777, and corresponds
in its external appearance exactly with that of the Chapel,
although its interior arrangement is naturally very different.
Ten pilasters, with feeble capitals of a tasteless composite
order, are disposed round the walls, standing each one singly at
intervals of twelve feet on a rustic basement ten feet high, and
supporting a handsome stucco frieze and bold cornice, the work
of Italian artists. The pilasters themselves are ornamented with
stucco scroll-work of florid Roman character. From the cornice
springs the ceiling, which is also very richly ornamented in
stucco, designed, modelled, and painted in the same style as the
ceiling of the Chapel, by Mayers, under the direction of Sir
William Chambers. In the five panels on the east side of the Hall
are placed full-length portraits of Queen Elizabeth, the foundress,
in her state robes; of Archbishop Ussher, Archbishop King, Bishop
Berkeley, and Provost Baldwin.[153] In four of the panels on the
opposite side are portraits of Edmund Burke--not by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, as is usually asserted, but by Hoppner; of William
Molyneux; of Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, by Stewart (an American
artist of some reputation); and of Dean Swift. Under the centre
panel is placed an elaborate monument (which is represented in the
accompanying engraving) to Provost Baldwin, who died in 1758. The
monument is some nine feet long and about six feet high and four
feet in depth from the wall, and consists of three figures in white
marble standing over a sarcophagus of dark porphyry. It is the work
of a Dublin artist of the name of Hewetson, who executed it at his
studio at Rome. The Hall is seventy feet long to the base line
of the semicircular apse, which extends to a further distance of
twenty feet, and is forty feet wide and forty-four feet high. It
is lighted by three windows in the circular apse at the upper end,
and by a range of small fan-shaped windows placed over the cornice.
An elaborate gilt chandelier, designed to hold sixty wax candles,
remarkably light and graceful in character, and which belonged to
the old House of Commons in College Green, hangs in the centre of
the Hall (_see page_ 130). At the lower end, and over the deep
portico and doorway, is a room in which is placed a small organ
that formerly stood in the old Chapel, and which is traditionally
said to have been taken out of a Spanish ship which formed part of
the Armada, and was wrecked on the coast of Ireland.
[Illustration: BALDWIN’S MONUMENT.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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