How does a sculptor make a portrait of a man who is already becoming legend? The question is harder than it sounds. By the time Power set to work on a portrait of Michael Collins — in the weeks or months after Collins’s death in August 1922 — the process of mythologisation was already well advanced. Collins was being spoken of in terms that placed him beyond the ordinary human register: the Big Fellow, the architect of guerrilla warfare, the man who made the Treaty and paid for it with his life.
Power’s answer was to ignore the myth entirely.
The Challenge of the Revolutionary Portrait
The portrait bust has a long and distinguished history as a form of public commemoration, but it carries with it a set of inherited conventions that can work against honesty. The elevated plinth, the truncated torso, the slightly upward gaze — these are not neutral choices. They encode a particular vision of the subject: composed, superior, already translated into the realm of the permanent and the exemplary.
Power worked against these conventions throughout his career. His portrait busts tend toward the contingent rather than the fixed — they catch their subjects in the middle of something rather than after everything has been resolved. It is a difficult balance to strike in a medium that is by its nature static, and it required constant technical discipline to maintain.
The Collins bust is the most striking example of this quality in his work.
What the Bronze Shows
The face Power gives Collins is recognisable from photographs, but it is not a copy of any photograph. It is a sculptural interpretation that makes choices no photograph could make: about weight, about the quality of attention in the eyes, about the relationship between the tension in the jaw and the stillness of the brow.
What is most striking is the absence of triumph. Collins at the time of his death was 31 years old, at the end of a civil war he had helped to start and may have been trying to end. His face in Power’s rendering carries something of that complexity — not grief exactly, not resolution, but something more ambivalent. A man in the middle of things who has been suddenly stilled.
The most honest image we have of Collins is not a photograph. It is a bronze by a Dublin sculptor who understood that the truth of a face lies not in its likeness but in its weight.
The Hugh Lane Collection
The bust is now held in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it sits among a collection of Irish portraiture that allows for instructive comparisons. Beside the more conventional commemorative bronzes of the period, Power’s Collins stands out for its psychological density. It asks more of the viewer than a commemorative object usually does.
This is partly a function of the medium — Power’s surface treatment invites close inspection in a way that more highly polished bronzes do not — and partly a function of his refusal to simplify. The Collins he made is not the Collins of the legend. It is something more useful: a record of a particular human being at a particular moment, preserved in the only material that might outlast the myth.
Legacy
The Collins bust has been widely reproduced — in postage stamps, in books, in documentary films — and this reproduction has had a curious effect. The image has become so familiar that it is easy to miss what is actually in it. To see it in person, in the gallery, is to be reminded of the difference between an image and an object; between information and presence.
That reminder is, finally, what Power’s best work achieves. He made things that resisted being reduced to their own reproduction. In a century increasingly dominated by the reproduced image, that is not a small achievement.