The Senate Casket returns from its travels …

The casket, commissioned in 1924 by historian and senator, Alice Stopford Green, as a gift to the first Senate of the Irish Free State, has come home to the Academy Library in Dawson Street, following a 4-month show ‘The Arts and Crafts Movement: making it Irish’ at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College http://www.bc.edu/sites/artmuseum/exhibitions/mii/

Considered a masterpiece of metalworking in the Arts and Crafts style, the casket’s maker and designer, Mia Cranwill, made some interesting observations in relation to the design and the significance of the figures portrayed on the panels of the Gallarus Oratory-inspired casket https://www.ria.ie/senate-casket

Since it was transferred to the Academy 80 years ago, in 1936, on the dissolution of the Senate, the casket has been studied by art historians, Dr Nicola Gordon Bowe and Dr Elizabeth Cumming, Dr Wendy Kaplan, curator of LACMA’s 2004-5 exhibition ‘The Arts & Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880-1920:  design for the modern world,’ http://www.lacma.org/template/arts-crafts-movement and latterly by Dr Diana Larssen and Dr Vera Kreilkamp, who curated the Boston show.