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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
]]>Pádraic Ó Conaire (1882–1928) was a Galway-born writer who produced his most significant work in the Irish language — short stories, sketches, a novel — before dying young in poverty in Dublin. He was a figure of the Revival, but a peripheral one: too bohemian for the academy, too committed to Irish for the anglophone literary establishment, beloved in Connacht in ways that never quite translated to the capital.
The commission for a memorial came from the Galway community itself, organised in the years following Ó Conaire’s death. That Power received it was a function of his standing in Irish artistic life by the mid-1930s. He was a full RHA member, an established portraitist, and — perhaps most importantly — a sculptor who was trusted to make something that would feel right for the west of Ireland.
Power understood that Ó Conaire was not a hero in any conventional sense. He was a storyteller. And you do not make a storyteller heroic — you make him present.
The bronze is slightly under life-size, which is an unusual choice for public memorial work and a deliberate one. To make the figure life-size or larger would have been to claim for Ó Conaire a grandeur that would have felt false to his reputation and his life. Power instead chose intimacy: a man you could sit beside, or walk past without noticing until you were almost upon him.
The pose is unconventional for the period. Ó Conaire is shown seated on a low plinth, elbows on knees, head slightly inclined — the posture of someone who has just finished talking, or is about to begin. There is no attribute: no book, no pen, none of the symbolic objects that would locate him in literary tradition. He is just a man sitting, and the absence of symbolism is itself the most powerful statement Power could have made about this particular subject.
The surface treatment is worth noting too. Power’s bronze work was consistently warmer in tone than much contemporary Irish sculpture — a consequence of his hands-on involvement in the casting process. The Ó Conaire bronze has a patina that rewards close inspection: it is not the uniform dark green of weathered civic sculpture, but something more varied, more alive.
In 1999 the figure was stolen — removed from its plinth overnight. The response in Galway was immediate and visceral, and it revealed something important about the relationship that had developed between the sculpture and the city over the six decades since its installation. There were vigils. There was newspaper coverage that treated the theft not as vandalism but as bereavement. A temporary replacement — a fibreglass cast — was installed within weeks and felt, by almost universal agreement, inadequate.
The original bronze was found some months later, damaged, in a Dublin yard. It was restored and returned to Eyre Square, where it sits today. What the episode demonstrated — and what Power could not have predicted — is that a sculpture’s meaning is not fixed at the moment of making. It accumulates. It deepens with use, with proximity, with the daily habit of walking past a figure until it becomes part of the grammar of a place.
The Ó Conaire memorial is the work by which Power is most widely known, and it is tempting to treat it as representative of his entire output. In some ways it is: the same qualities that distinguish the Galway bronze — the restraint, the refusal of heroism, the attention to the particular — run through his portrait busts, his ecclesiastical work, his lesser-known public commissions.
But in another sense the Ó Conaire is unique in his oeuvre, because it is the work in which the match between subject and sculptor was most exact. Power found in this Connacht writer a subject who demanded exactly the qualities Power naturally possessed. The result is not just a fine sculpture. It is a piece of public furniture, in the best possible sense: something that has become inseparable from the life of the city it inhabits.
]]>Power’s answer was to ignore the myth entirely.
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.
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 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.
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.
]]>This reputation obscures the more complex figure who taught Albert Power at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in the early years of the twentieth century. Sheppard the teacher was something different from Sheppard the commemorative sculptor: more varied, more technically rigorous, more attentive to the European tradition that had formed him. It is this Sheppard — the teacher — who shaped Power’s eye.
Sheppard had trained in London and in Paris, and brought back to Dublin an exposure to Rodin’s influence that was unusual in the Irish context. He was not a Rodinesque sculptor himself — his temperament ran toward the contained and the classical rather than the fragmentary and the expressive — but he understood what Rodin had made possible, and he conveyed that understanding to his students.
The key lesson was tactile: that the surface of a sculpture is not a skin stretched over an armature, but a record of decisions made by hands in direct contact with material. Every mark tells. Every hesitation is legible. A sculptor who does not understand this produces work that looks carved or cast but does not look made — and the distinction, to an educated eye, is fatal.
Power absorbed this lesson completely.
The continuities between Sheppard and Power are evident in their shared commitment to naturalism — both were resistant to the pull of abstraction that was beginning to reshape European sculpture in the early decades of the century — and in their technical approaches to surface and patina.
But the divergences are equally instructive. Where Sheppard’s work tends toward the mythological and the allegorical, Power’s is almost exclusively concerned with the particular. Sheppard made Cú Chulainn. Power made Pádraic Ó Conaire — a specific man, in a specific posture, without symbolic attribute.
The student went where the teacher could not quite follow: into the territory of the ordinary, the un-heroic, the face that carries its history in its lines rather than in the set of its jaw.
This is not a criticism of Sheppard. The mythological mode was genuinely his — it expressed something real in his artistic temperament. But it is a measure of how completely Power had assimilated and then departed from his teacher’s example that his mature work occupies such different ground.
Where the debt to Sheppard is most visible in Power’s work is not in subject matter or compositional approach but in technique: the handling of bronze surfaces, the relationship between modelled and carved elements, the patience with fine detail that characterises both men’s work at its best.
Power’s studio practice as it can be reconstructed from contemporary accounts and from the evidence of the work itself was marked by the same quality of sustained attention that Sheppard had modelled. He was a slow worker — slow in the sense of careful rather than slow in the sense of unproductive — and he returned repeatedly to works in progress over extended periods.
This is a habit that can only be learned, not invented. Power learned it from Sheppard.
The relationship between Sheppard and Power deserves more sustained scholarly attention than it has received. The correspondence between them, if it survives, has not been fully catalogued. The RHA archives hold material relating to both men that has been only partially examined. There is work to be done here, and the doing of it would illuminate not only two individual careers but the transmission of sculptural knowledge in early twentieth-century Ireland — a transmission that happened, as it usually does, not through manifestos or theoretical statements but through a teacher and a student working in the same room.
This archive hopes, over time, to contribute to that work.
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