The Irish Georgian Society warmly congratulates Mary Nevin for winning the Desmond Guinness Scholarship 2025, which will enable her to progress her research into the Eighteenth-Century chimneypiece industry in Britain and Ireland

The Desmond Guinness Scholarship will facilitate Mary Nevin’s PhD research on the European Research Council Advanced Grant project, STONE-WORK, at Trinity College Dublin. Her study, supervised by Prof. Christine Casey and Dr. Melanie Hayes, examines the eighteenth-century chimneypiece industry in Britain and Ireland. Often constituting the single most expensive unit of architectural and sculpted display in elite interiors, the chimneypiece has generated a conspicuously small historiography. Mary’s research seeks to redress this lacuna by examining material supply networks, authorship, and the role of the artisan, to reconstruct the collaborative and material processes involved in chimneypiece production.

The Desmond Guinness Scholarship will enable Mary to consult archival material at Suffolk Archives, the University of Bristol Library, the British Library, and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Business records relating to regional stone-working enterprises in eastern England will provide data on commercial practices, extending Mary’s existing analysis of the trade in decorative stone and yielding comparative information regarding commercialisation in the chimneypiece industry. Material associated with the Paty family of Bristol will extend the project’s evidentiary basis for sculptor specialisations, while also providing information pertaining to design and marketability. Family and estate papers connected to the Perceval family of Cork will contribute to knowledge of artisanal networks that underpinned chimneypiece production in the early eighteenth century.

Mary expects that examination of these varied sources will illuminate the breadth and regional diversity of the eighteenth-century chimneypiece industry, advancing understandings of elite acquisition, mercantile networks, and the chimneypiece as a vehicle for emulative self-fashioning in the domestic environment.