The Gazette 1972

Figures in the Hall

C. P. Curran, S C. D. Litt.

Gandon

Great Hall

Gandon's Great Hall differs little from its original form.

Certain levels have been altered between the hall,

vestibule, and portico. The vestibule still bears its panels

displaying the mace and staff, fasces, axe, and scales of

justice, but in Gandon's day a second vestibule beyond

the clock gave on to the Rolls Court which approxi-

mately occupied the present site of the Supreme Court

and marked the northern limit of his building. This

Court was taken down and replaced in 1835 by a

differently sited Rolls Court, when the new Nisi Prius

Court was also erected.

There was, however, a material difference in its

general aspect. Time, which, in Sir Thomas Browne's

phrase, antiquates antiquity, did not spare its minor

monuments. The hall as we knew it before 1922 was at

®nce more severe and more appropriately ornate. It was

Bagged in echoing stone and, though the niches which

Gandon had designed for allegorical figures were never

Ailed, statues of judges were set around the walls and

the bare unpainted pillars rose austerely to a richer and

more significant decoration of the inner dome. On the

pccasion of the opening of the building for public use

m Michaelmas 1796 a writer in the

Dublin Evening

Post (19th November 1796) gave an account of this

decoration :

. Round the inside of the dome is a continued large

trieze of foliage, festoons of oak leaves, etc., and on the

centre over each window, united with their ornaments

are eight medallions of the antient legislators, much

lar

ger than life, viz. : Solon, Confucius, Numa, Lycur-

gus, Alfred, Moses, Manco Capac, and the Irish Legis-

'ator, Ollamh Fodhla. In the piers between the windows

exec

uted in stucco eight colossal statues in basso-

relievo emblematic of Justice, Eloquence, Wisdom,

liberty, Mercy, Prudence, Law, and Punishment, all

executed to the bold masterly true style of the antique-

grotesque—but the eye is particularly attracted by the

statue of Punishment who stands with the fasces, the

axe surrounded with rods, the string! of which are

unbound as letting them loose to execute judgment,

^hilst the statue has its head averted and the hand

before the eyes as loth to behold the punishment that

Justi

obliges Law to put in force." This is the work

which Gandon mentioned in 1794 as having been cast

and then modelled

in situ

the better to emphasise its

uef. To this contemporary description we may add a

f t ^

r d s

o u r

own. The frieze ran scroll-wire above

windows and was lightly connected between the

piers with the eight bas-relief statues which stood on

insoles. Of these allegorical figures other than Punish-

ment I can record only that Law was a noble female

flgure helmeted and with a scroll in her left hand,

flolding aloft in her right the lightnings of the Law,

grille Mercy, garlanded, carried on her left arm an olive

nch and, graciously extending her right arm, trod

a sword and axe. Tablets on the consoles carried

Ac names. The medallions were circular. Solon was

aid and clean-shaven; Confucius, bearded, had a sun-

a t

of reeds or straw, and Manco Capac wore a high

own of feathers. The identity of this Peruvian legis-

°r, son of the sun, who introduced the arts of civil-

isation to his country, began early to baffle guide-book

writers who invented Latin titles for him like Marcello

Capae, though his name like the others was clearly

written below. Not much later the French sculptor,

Chaudet, was carving some of the same subjects on the

Legislation pediment of one of the Louvre pavilions.

His statues included Moses, Numa, and Manco Capac.

Manco Capac also appears in Samuel Humphrey's

translation from the French of certain

Peruvian Tales

published in Dublin in 1784 in a fifth edition. The

translator's introduction to my copy, written in 1734,

largely consists of a long account of Manco Capac

drawn from Sir William Temple's essay on Heroic

Virtue. It is evident that the Peruvian still stood for

American Jurisprudence in European eyes in the very

decade which saw Thomas Jefferson draw up the

Declaration of Independence.

The Dome

The interior dome which carried this decoration

opened through a balustraded aperture upon an outside

dome of hardly less dimensions, lit by twelve windows

in the drum. Gandon, as was evident in the Custom

House, was partial to lantern lighting and certainly the

light which poured into the hall from this source fell

with fine effect. There is reason to think that the

external dome was intended for use as a library, but, in

fact, from its earliest days it became a depository for the

Auditor General's records. Up to 1812 his books and

documents had accumulated here to the enormous mass

of fifty-two tons, threatening the safety of the entire

fabric. When this great bulk was eventually removed,

the dome continued to be used for storing records of

which mv predecessor in the King's Bench, Mr. Henry

Vivian Yeo, had charge as a young man, and I have

seen the groove in the gallery rail worn by the rope

and pulley by means of which, as he told me, these

records were lowered to the hall. On the attic pedestal

above the continuous entablature which ran around the

inner dome, there were also four panels in bas-relief

placed over the openings to the Court. Whether these

pseudo-historical designs were by Edward Smyth him-

self or were the work of an assistant they hardly deserved

the encomia with which they were received as being

"elegantly designed and executed with strict adherence

to costume, in the habits, arms, and decorations of the

times". In fact the Normans appeared in plate armour

and the general composition exhibited only mediocre

ability.

The Ha'l, a bustling meeting place

This ha'l in the absence of librarv or consultation

rooms was the meeting-place of counsel, attorney, client

and witnesses. Its bustling life was a perennial source of

interested comment by visitors. It had become the rally-

ing point of the wits of the town and the focus of town

gossip. It doubled the parts of consulting room and

fashionable promenade, foreseeing which we find from

a King's Inns minute of 1796 the prudent Benchers

appointing thirteen tipstaves wearing black gowns and

black caps and carrying staves "for the purpose of

keeping the hall quiet and free from improper and