In the summer of 1922, within weeks of each other, three of the most significant figures of the Irish independence movement died. Cathal Brugha was shot on O’Connell Street on 5 July and died the following day. Arthur Griffith died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 12 August. Michael Collins was killed at Béal na Bláth on 22 August. In each case, Albert Power was called to make a death mask.
No other object in Irish cultural life brings you as close to that terrible summer as these three pieces of plaster. Together they constitute the most concentrated sequence of revolutionary death masks ever made in Ireland, and they were all made by the same pair of hands, within forty-seven days of each other.
What a Death Mask Is
A death mask is made by applying wet plaster directly to the face of the deceased, allowing it to set, and then lifting it away. The process takes perhaps twenty minutes. What remains is not an interpretation or a likeness — it is a direct physical record, as precise as a fingerprint. Every pore, every line, every asymmetry of the face is preserved exactly as it was in the moments after death.
The tradition is ancient, but it had particular currency in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a way of preserving the features of the eminent dead before photography could do so with comparable accuracy. By 1922, photography was well established, but the death mask retained something photography could not offer: three-dimensionality, physicality, the sense of an object that had actually touched the face it records.
Power understood this. He was a portraitist of the first order, and he knew that a death mask was both more and less than a portrait. More, because it was unmediated — no artistic judgement intervened between the face and the record. Less, because it captured only the face in repose, drained of the animation and expression that characterised the living person. The mask is a record of a face, not of a presence.
Cathal Brugha: The First
Brugha was shot on O’Connell Street, two days after the outbreak of the Civil War, while attempting to walk towards Free State forces rather than surrender. He died on 7 July 1922. His death was the first of the three that summer, and it placed Power in an impossible position — Brugha had been among the most uncompromising opponents of the Treaty that the Provisional Government, which Griffith and Collins led, had signed.
That Power made masks of men on both sides of the conflict — that he was trusted by the families of each — speaks to something important about his position in Irish cultural life. He was not a political figure. He was a craftsman of the highest order, and in a moment of extraordinary political violence, he was the person people turned to when they needed the face preserved.
Griffith and Collins: August
Arthur Griffith died on 12 August. Michael Collins died ten days later. Two architects of the Free State, dead within a fortnight, in the middle of the Civil War their Treaty had helped to start.
Power made a mask of Griffith and then, ten days later, a mask of Collins. The Collins mask is now one of the most recognisable objects in Irish cultural history, held at Collins Barracks and reproduced in countless books and documentaries. A cast is displayed at Cathal Brugha Barracks — a remarkable circumstance that places the faces of the two Civil War antagonists in each other’s institutional homes.
The Collins mask shows a young man — thirty-one years old — with strong, regular features. There is something in the set of the jaw that suggests the energy and decisiveness that contemporaries described. Power would later use the mask as the basis for his 1936 bronze portrait bust, now in the National Gallery of Ireland. That bust is the most accurate three-dimensional portrait of Collins in existence, because it was built on the direct physical record of his face.
Erskine Childers: November
In November 1922, three months after Collins, Erskine Childers was executed by the Free State government he had opposed. Power made a death mask of him too, extending the series into the autumn and completing what is, taken together, the most remarkable set of revolutionary memorial objects ever produced in Ireland.
Childers’s mask connects to the Power family through James Power, Albert’s son, whose relationship with the Childers family is documented in the family archive. Erskine Childers’s son — also Erskine Childers — later became the fourth President of Ireland.
What These Objects Mean
Death masks are uncomfortable objects. They exist at the intersection of art and mortality, of history and the intimate physical fact of a human face. To look at the Collins mask is to be confronted with the actuality of his death in a way that no portrait, photograph, or written account quite achieves.
Power made these masks because he was the person called upon to make them. But in doing so, he produced something that has outlasted almost everything else from that violent summer. The political arguments that divided Brugha from Collins, Collins from Childers, have receded into history. The faces remain — preserved in plaster, made permanent by the hands of a Dublin sculptor who understood that some things needed to be held.
“In each case, Power was called. In each case, he came. What he left behind is a record not of political positions or historical judgements, but of faces — the irreducible, particular faces of men who shaped the country we live in.”
The masks are held at the National Museum of Ireland (Collins Barracks), Cathal Brugha Barracks, and in private collections. If you have not seen them, you should.