Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Féin and first President of Dáil Éireann, died on 12 August 1922 — just ten days before Michael Collins — of a cerebral haemorrhage in a Dublin nursing home. He was fifty years old. Albert Power was again called to make a death mask, producing in the same summer two of the most significant memorial objects of the Irish revolutionary period.
Griffith’s mask, like Collins’s, captures a face drained of the animation that characterised him in life — the intense, compact features of a man who had driven Irish separatist politics through decades of struggle before seeing his cause partially achieved in the Treaty he helped negotiate. Power’s handling of the plaster gives the surface a particular quiet weight.
That Power made death masks of both Griffith and Collins within ten days of each other in August 1922 — two architects of the Irish Free State, dead in the same month — places him at the precise hinge point of modern Irish history.
Significance: One of a pair of death masks Power made in August 1922 capturing the two principal architects of the Irish Free State within ten days of each other.
Made in the immediate aftermath of Griffith’s death, the mask is held in the National Museum of Ireland collection.