Mulvany, John Skipton (1813–70), architect, was probably born in Dublin, fourth son of Thomas James Mulvany (qv), painter, biographer, and founder member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, and his wife, Mary (1779–1865), daughter of Dr Cyrus Field, physician. The family milieu was artistic and convivial; Thomas James Mulvany, whose brilliant conversation made him a society darling, was appointed keeper of the RHA in 1825 and was the biographer of his friend James Gandon (qv); his brother, John George Mulvany (qv), was also an artist. The careers of Thomas James's five sons reflect his interests in art, architecture, and engineering – the eldest, William Thomas (qv), was an engineer who became commissioner in the board of works and then a mining expert in the Ruhr; the second, George Francis (qv), was an artist and first director of the NGI; the third, Richard Field, owned and edited a Dublin newspaper; the youngest went into mining; and John Skipton became an architect. His father, who used his contacts assiduously to further his children's careers, arranged for him to be apprenticed to William Deane Butler (qv), a catholic architect, best remembered for his courthouses and Gothic churches. The Mulvanys were not particular about religion – Thomas James and John George were apparently orphaned and brought up by a catholic bishop, but John George was buried in a Church of Ireland vault; William became a protestant while still a schoolboy, though he married a catholic. John Skipton seems to have remained catholic, but he received few ecclesiastical commissions in a period of intense church-building, and was on the contrary, much employed by quakers.
In September 1833 he completed his articles and that year exhibited for the first time in the RHA. He showed at the academy until 1868, always exhibiting architectural sketches, and became a full member in 1854. Family connections helped him to become established as an architect; his father's friend James Perry was a successful quaker businessman who anticipated the benefits of investing in railways. He was a director of the Dublin & Kingstown (D & K) Railway, which company employed Mulvany to design an extension to the hotel at Salthill in 1836. The earliest known instance of his work, it was one of his few Gothic buildings. The D & K's treasurer, James Pim (qv), employed Mulvany to renovate his home, Monkstown Castle, while the company's solicitor, Pierce Mahony (qv), had him design a villa at Glenageary which was never built. Mulvany was, however, probably responsible for the Perry and Mahony vaults at Mount Jerome cemetery, and he redesigned Mount Anville, the home of railway contractor William Dargan (qv), in Goatstown, Dublin, introducing an ionic portico using granite blocks of remarkable size.
Throughout the 1840s Mulvany was employed on building stations for the expanding railway system. Blackrock station, built 1841, was in his preferred neo-classical style, and the new terminus at Kingstown was completed the following year. In both he used a favourite device, an ionic portico. The Midland Great Western Railway appointed him company director in 1845 at a salary of £250; he held this position for five years, after which he was remunerated for specific jobs only. He was responsible for the stations at Athlone, Mullingar, and Galway; and the station hotels at Athenry and Galway (latterly the Great Southern). The station at Mullingar, designed to fit between two railway lines, one curving and the other straight, has been called ‘the quirkiest nineteenth-century station in Ireland’ (Williams, 372) and the Athlone station has also been judged ‘unusual . . . bulky and uncompromising’ (Casey, 74). In 1846 Mulvany began designing the Broadstone terminus near the Royal Canal in Dublin; work on it continued into the early 1850s. On an elevated site and over 100 ft (30.5 m) wide, it is Mulvany's master work. In 1952 Maurice Craig was moved by ‘its lonely grandeur emphasised by disuse’ to write an encomium of famously purple prose: ‘The Broadstone by John Skipton Mulvany is the last building in Dublin to partake of the sublime . . . It stands on rising ground, and the traveller who sees it for the first time, so unexpected in its massive amplitude, feels a little as he might if he were to stumble unawares upon the monstrous silences of Karnak or Luxor’ (Craig, 300).
The geographical references are to the Egyptian character of Mulvany's design. He was a neo-classicist who developed a free, personal style, which mixed in oriental motifs and designs. His style has been termed Graeco-Egyptian and ‘ornate eclecticism’ (O'Dwyer, IADS, 22). In the Broadstone the central section tapers towards the top and the cornice is curved underneath. Though future architects admired the boldness and freedom of his oriental borrowings, contemporaries had reservations. His obituary in the Irish Builder (15 May 1870) writes approvingly of his neo-classicism before remarking frigidly: ‘it might have been well had he not ambitioned other less orthodox styles of architecture’. For the Mullingar District Lunatic Asylum (1847–55), later St Loman's Hospital, he was compelled by the government to work in the neo-Gothic style. He had little feeling for this, and the resulting design – at three storeys high and forty-one bays across, one of his largest buildings – is little admired.
Though his reputation rests on his railway stations, Mulvany is also remembered as an architect of yacht clubs. The Kingstown Boat Club (later the Royal St George Yacht Club) had limited funds, so his design for it in 1842 was modest. However, eight years later he was given a far bigger budget to design the Royal Irish, which he made an ambitious colonnaded façade with a pilastered central hall lit from above by a glazed dome. In 1854 Mulvany became one of the first architects to join the Royal Irish Yacht Club.
His private commissions are also notable. After the death of his father (1845) he moved out of the family home on Cross Avenue and built what he described as a remarkably neat ten-roomed cottage in Brighton Vale, Seapoint. This appears to be the present no. 5, the first house on the road to be built; he probably also designed the neighbouring houses to create one of Dublin's most charming roads. Longford Terrace and Trafalgar Terrace in Monkstown are also attributed to him. About 1848 he married Eleanor Burke, who was fourteen years his junior, and moved to an old property, Lakelands at Kilmacud. She tragically died of consumption four years later (3 July 1852). There were no children and Mulvany never remarried. He remained at Kilmacud until 1857 and designed a number of houses in the locality, including Hazlewood (latterly part of St Benildus College). After James Perry, his most important patron was another quaker, Joseph Malcolmson, a manufacturer from Portlaw, Co. Waterford, who employed Mulvany's brother William to manage his mining operations in Germany. For Malcolmson and his sons, Mulvany designed or altered at least seven houses, including Leopardstown House in Dublin, Minella in Clonmel, and the imposing, towered Mayfield in Portlaw. These houses were all neo-classical except Villa Marina in Dunmore East, which has oriental roofs.
After moving to Sandymount (1857), Mulvany transferred at a later period to Trafalgar Terrace, Monkstown, where he lived until shortly before his death from cirrhosis of the liver, which occurred in the first fortnight of May 1870. He died in a home in Clonliffe Terrace, where he had perhaps moved to be nursed. Little is recorded of his character but according to one contemporary he was fond of foxhunting and cigars, and it is speculated that he had a drink problem, given the cause of his death at a relatively young age. Forgotten for a generation after his death, his reputation was revived in 1914 with the publication of Albert E. Richardson's Monumental classic architecture in Great Britain and Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which singled out the Broadstone railway station: ‘If any building expresses the character of its purpose, it is this magnificent terminus which so well illustrates the application of the monumental manner in the spirit of modernity’ (88).