WELCOME

My name is Reiltín Murphy and I am interested in many things such as the written word, book structures, books and writing as art, my parents’ stained glass, my family history.

​

PLEASE NOTE that all images on this site are copyright to Reiltin Murphy

 

The purpose of this website is to share my research and to hear from you - you might have something to add, or correct, or you and I might have ancestors in common.

 

I grew up in Dublin closely involved with Murphy-Devitt Studios where my artist parents made stained glass, and I watched my uncle Peter Dowd carve wooden statues. My aunt made hats and their mother sang and baked and wrote “wee verses”.

 

I attended the National College of Art and Design in the early 1970s and then worked for some years at the National Museum of Ireland as an archaeological illustrator, branching out occasionally to include the Weingreen Museum at Trinity College, the Department of Archaeology at UCD Belfield and the British Museum.

 

A move to County Wexford coincided with my growing interest in calligraphy. I attended the Roehampton Institute (University of Surrey) in London for their new BA in Calligraphy & Bookbinding in the mid-1990s, then, to get an Irish perspective on my British studies, I returned to the National College of Art and Design in the late 1990s for an MA in Visual Communication. My BA dissertation was on the English bookbinder Katharine Adams and it is reproduced here. My MA was about an Irish 16th century binding and manuscript; I will add it to this website when it emerges from the “safe place” it currently occupies.

 

Family history is my current interest and retirement from lecturing in Design Visual Communication at Waterford Institute of Technology gives time for the slow search and enjoyment of the stories which emerge. I hope that you might enjoy the stories too. If you think we might be related please get in touch.

​

This website is a work in progress, gaps will be filled in due course.