Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork and playwright, died on 25 October 1920 after seventy-four days on hunger strike in Brixton Prison, London. His death convulsed Ireland and drew international attention to the independence struggle in a way few single events had managed.
This is a life mask rather than a death mask — made from a living face, almost certainly during MacSwiney’s time in Cork before his imprisonment. The distinction matters: it preserves not the repose of death but the particular quality of a living face held still, the skin tension and musculature of a man still fully present. That this face would be dead within months gives the object a particular charge it could not have been intended to carry at the time of making.
Power’s decision — or commission — to make a mask of MacSwiney places this work among the earliest of his series of revolutionary commemorations, predating by two years the concentrated sequence of death masks he would make in the Civil War summer of 1922.
Significance: Among the earliest of Power’s revolutionary masks, capturing MacSwiney alive — months before his death on hunger strike brought Ireland’s cause to world attention.
Made circa October 1920. The mask is held in the National Museum of Ireland collection.