W. B. Yeats 1865 - 1939. A tribute in bronze by Henry Moore erected by admirers of the Poet, October 1967.
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TitleW. B. Yeats 1865 - 1939. A tribute in bronze by Henry Moore erected by admirers of the Poet, October 1967.; Commemorative leaflet inviting admirers to subscribe to the tribute.
History/Biography: Born in Sydney, Australia, on 7 March 1903, Raymond Herbert McGrath studied arts at the University of Sydney from 1921, transferring to the newly established School of Architecture in 1923 and graduating in 1926 with a first class honours Bachelor of Architecture degree. He moved to England that year and became the first Research Student of Architecture at Clare College, Cambridge. His association in Cambridge with Mansfield Forbes led to his being commissioned by Forbes to redesign the interior of Forbe’s Cambridge house, Finella. The decade from 1929 to 1939 saw McGrath establish himself as a noted figure of the Modern Movement in Britain though his work at Finella, St. Anne’s Hill, near Chertsey, Surrey, 1937, as a consultant for the BBC, 1930-35, which involved him in both the architecture and interior design of the new studios at Langham Place, London, and though publications including in particular ‘Twentieth Century Houses’ (Faber and Faber, London, 1933) and ‘Glass in Architecture and Decoration’ (Architectural Press, London, 1937).
The outbreak of World Way II brought McGrath’s burgeoning architectural practice to a end. In 1940 he was appointed an Official War Artist but moved to Dublin that same year to take up a position as senior architect with the Office of Public Works. In 1948 he was appointed Principal Architect at the OPW, a post he held until his retirement in 1968. He designed the Cenotaph, Leinster Lawn, Dublin and carried out substantial interior designs schemes for example at the State Apartments, Dublin Castle and Aras an Uachtarain, but his OPW career was characterised by disappointment as several substantial projects including an office building at Dublin Castle and, most notably, the JFK Memorial Concert Hall, were ultimately abandoned.
McGrath was a member of the Stamp Advisory Committee and founding President of the Society of Designers in Ireland. Following retirement from the OPW, he received a number of architectural commissioned, most notably to design the new Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery on Ely Place. In 1970, he was appointed Professor of Architecture at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and was briefly President of the RHA in 1977. He did not live to see the Ely Place Gallery finished, dying in Dublin on 2 December 1977.
In 1930 McGrath married Mary Catherine Crozier of Dallas Texas, who had been a fellow student at Cambridge. They had two children, Norman and Jennifer.
McGrath's son-in-law, the journalist Donal O'Donovan published a definitive biography of McGrath in 1995 ('God's Architect', Kilbride Books, Bray, 1995).
