Enfilade

On view at Dublin Castle:

‘The Metal Stamp’d by Honest Fame’: Gold and Silver Boxes in Dublin, 1662–1830
Dublin Castle, 14 November 2024 — 31 March 2025

This exhibition is the first to present the work of the mostly forgotten artisans who worked in the small streets around Dublin Castle during the Georgian era making beautiful boxes in gold and silver for presentation to dukes, earls, and other luminaries. There are boxes made for heroes and villains alike—Edmund Burke, Henry Grattan, Luke Gardiner, Viscount Castlereagh, naval captains who fought the French, a city merchant who confronted Robert Emmet, and Henry Johnson, the victor in the bloodiest battle of 1798. The exhibition highlights the box makers’ inventiveness and ingenuity, showing the small luxuries they made for their fashionable and prosperous customers. In addition to loans from Irish collections, the exhibition brings sumptuous artefacts not seen here in centuries, such as the bejewelled gold Rathdowne box from 1823— back to Dublin from the US, UK, and continental Europe. The exhibition reveals Georgian Dublin as a vibrant place where hierarchical deference, civic politics, personal ostentation, sentimental attachment, anxieties about invasion, and rebellion all found expression in small, exquisitely made boxes.