Adam Loftus

Adam Loftus was born in Yorkshire, and was educated at Cambridge. ¹ By 1557 he possessed a living in England, but in 1560 he came to Ireland as chaplain to the Lord Lieutenant. Only a year later he was nominated as Archbishop of Armagh, and was consecrated in 1563.  Four years later he was translated to Dublin, and in 1581 he became Lord Chancellor of Ireland.  He played an influential role in the campaign for the establishment of a university in Dublin towards the end of the sixteenth century, and he was named as the first Provost of Trinity College in the foundation charter of 1592. The office was a nominal one and he resigned before the first student was admitted two years later. He was survived by sixteen of his twenty children.

Painting Details

Oil on canvas
It is not known when this picture entered the College Collection, but it has considerable quality and may be seventeenth-century in date. 

1. Anne Crookshank and David Webb, Paintings and Sculptures in Trinity College Dublin (Dublin, 1990), p. 86.
2. J.V. Luce, Trinity College Dublin, The First 400 Years (Dublin, 1992), pp 1 – 6.