Deirdre Cullen was awarded a PhD at University College Dublin in 2026 for her study of the painted decorations in the Long Gallery at Castletown House, Co. Kildare. Having previously graduated with an MA in Art History at UCD, while working as a guide and information officer at Castletown she developed a curiosity about the eighteenth-century painted scheme in the Long Gallery, executed in 1775 and 1776 by the young English artist Charles Reuben Ryley. She returned to UCD to undertake a PhD on this topic.
Her thesis argues that, despite the absence of an architect’s steering hand, the Long Gallery scheme is strongly aligned with the neoclassical painted room genre established in England by the architects James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, Robert Adam and James Wyatt in the 1760s and 1770s. But the Gallery stands apart in its sheer scale and in the complexity of its iconography, with hundreds of individual painted images celebrating the history, mythology, literature and visual legacy of the ancient world, created largely under the direction of Lady Louisa Conolly (1743-1821) in an era when women did not typically receive a formal education in the classics.
Deirdre Cullen’s doctoral research was funded by the Irish Research Council in partnership with the Office of Public Works. She was joint awardee of the Irish Georgian Society’s Desmond Guinness Scholarship in 2021.
The 2026 talks’ series at Castletown House is dedicated to the memory of the late Jeanne Meldon and is presented by the Office of Public Works (OPW) in association with The Castletown Foundation.

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