![]() Moore was enraged by the incident and painted his front door red to prevent it happening again. One night Gogarty staggered home drunk from his local pub and mistakenly let himself into his neighbour’s house. The two men, it is said, once lived next door to each other on a terrace of Georgian houses with uniformly white doors. John Gogarty, the prototype for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Equally improbable is the popular story involving two prominent early twentieth Irish writers – the novelist George Moore and Oliver St. There is absolutely no historical evidence for either of these legends. Once again the rebellious Dubliners refused and turned their front doors into a riot of colour. Some claim that after the death of her beloved husband Prince Albert, the grieving monarch ordered all the doors in Dublin painted black in his memory. A similar story dates from reign of Queen Victoria in the late 1800’s. In an act of the defiance, the artistic and expressive population responded by painting them in the brightest hues they could find. It has been suggested, for instance, that the practice originated at the time of Elizabeth 1, when a Puritan administrator decreed that all the city’s door and window frames should be the same drab brown colour. ![]() ![]() Many theories have been put forward to explain why they are so brightly painted and ornamented, none unfortunately likely to be true. The eighteenth and nineteenth century doors of Dublin, perhaps the most iconic images of the city’s architectural Golden Age. ![]()
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