Review: Decorative Plasterwork in Ireland and Europe: Ornament and the Early Modern Interior by Christine Casey and Conor Lucey, eds.

In a 1977 JSAH review, Robert Raley praised Geoffrey Beard’s Decorative Plasterwork in Great Britain as “another contribution to the slowly building storehouse of literature concerning the important, but generally neglected, field of the builder’s art.”¹ Yet the perceived necessity of a 2010 reprint of the volume, which would itself be lauded with the claim that “for those who are looking for a historic resource on the makers and styles of British plasterwork, look no further,” demonstrates the glacial speed at which this storehouse of literature is being filled.² Despite a sizable proliferation of scholarship on eighteenth-century architecture and, especially, interiors, studies focusing on decorative plasterwork have continued to lag behind.^3...