President's Study (Library)
The President’s Study is another part of the 1751 house. Its beautiful 18th-century ceiling was erected in this room in 1953. It has also been attributed to Cramillion and depicts The Elements and Seasons Presided over by Jupiter: ‘ Spring with flowers and industrious spade; Summer with grapes; Autumn with sickle and wheatsheaves; while Winter, a child with its back turned and hair ruffled, warms itself at a brazier…in the centre a vigorously modelled Jove’. It is contemporary with, and in the same Rococo style as, the ceiling in the Council of State Room, which is original to the house.
In 1948, Mespil House in Dublin, a house contemporary with Riverstown House and the Park Ranger’s Lodge, was being demolished to make way for apartment blocks. At the instigation of C P Curran, author of Dublin Decorative Plasterwork of the 17th and 18th Centuries, the developer was persuaded to give the ceilings to the Office of Public Works and this one was moved here. Curran considered this the finest of the Mespil House ceilings: ‘the loveliest stucco in Ireland…the very poetry of plaster’.
The mahogany library furniture, which was all made in Dublin, dates from the 18th to the 20th centuries.
