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The Dining Room is equipped with robust furniture
designed to support the heavy meals traditionally consumed
by enormous gentlemen in the company of beautiful ladies with
tiny waists. Happily such traditions can be upheld here once
again. The beautiful ladies with tiny waists of yesteryear
look down approvingly from the walls, allowing the
enormous gentlemen of today the opportunity to assess current
form against the old.
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The Dinning Room is set
in preparation for another heavy meal. |
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Lady Helen Vincent, over the sideboard, was
wife of the financier and diplomat, Sir Edgar Vincent, later
created First and last Viscount D'Abernon. The Duchess of Leinster,
to the left of the fireplace, wife of the Fifth Duke was sadly
taken by consumption in 1895, just two years after this picture
was painted. Business was completely suspended in Maynooth
and its neighbourhood on the day of her funeral and the blinds
of the houses in the village were drawn in every instance.
Alongside wreaths from the people of Kildare at the graveside
lay a great wreath measuring 5 feet in diameter, composed of
orchids, white roses, lily of the valley, tuber-roses, gardenias
and arum lilies and bearing the inscription: "From H.R.H. The
Prince of Wales, as a mark of sincere regret".
These two famously beautiful daughters of the First Earl
of Feversham were, with their husbands, members of that small
group of aristocratic and talented people known as The Souls.
The picture of the Lady over the door at the
end of the room is of Lord Feversham's Anderson grandmother.
Over the left hand door at this end of the room is Thomas Duncombe
Eden of Beamish Park in County Durham. |
