Robert Erskine Childers — author, sailor, and passionate Irish republican — was executed by firing squad on 24 November 1922, at Beggars Bush Barracks, Dublin, on the order of the Provisional Government he had opposed. He was forty-two years old. His execution was one of the most controversial acts of the Civil War period, carried out just weeks after the government had introduced emergency powers allowing execution for possession of arms.
Albert Power made a death mask of Childers in the aftermath of his execution, adding him to the remarkable sequence of masks he had already made of Cathal Brugha, Arthur Griffith, and Michael Collins in the same year. That Power — who worked for patrons on both sides of the Treaty divide — made masks of men who had killed each other’s comrades speaks to his unusual position as an artist trusted across the fault lines of the Civil War.
The mask is connected to the Power family through James Power, Albert’s son, whose relationship with the Childers family is documented in the family archive.
Significance: Part of the most concentrated sequence of revolutionary death masks ever made in Ireland — four major figures of the independence movement, all within months of each other in 1922.
Erskine Childers’s son, also Erskine Childers, later became the fourth President of Ireland (1973–1974).