On 22 August 1922, Michael Collins was killed at Béal na Bláth, County Cork. He was thirty-one years old. Within hours of his body being brought to Dublin, Albert Power was called to take a death mask — pressing plaster directly to the face of the deceased to preserve an exact record of his features in the moments after death.
The mask is one of the most historically charged objects in Irish cultural life. Unlike a portrait made from sitting or memory, it is a direct physical record — the precise contours of Collins’s face, as accurate as a photograph but three-dimensional and tactile. Power worked quickly, as necessity demanded. What remains shows Collins in absolute repose: the strong jaw, the broad brow, the features relaxed beyond all expression.
There is no idealisation here, no sculptor’s licence. Only the unmediated record of a face at the moment history turned. The mask is held at the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks, and a cast is displayed at the Cathal Brugha Barracks Visitors Centre.
Significance: The most accurate physical record of Michael Collins’s appearance, made within hours of his death during the Irish Civil War.
Commissioned in the immediate aftermath of Collins’s death as both historical record and the basis for subsequent portrait work, including the 1936 bust now in the National Gallery of Ireland.