Made fourteen years after Collins’s death, and fourteen years after Power had pressed plaster to his face to make the death mask, this bronze portrait bust represents a different kind of reckoning with the same subject. Where the death mask is raw documentation, the bust is interpretation — Power working from the mask, from photographs, and from the living memory of those who had known Collins to reconstruct the face in bronze.
The result is the most widely reproduced image of Michael Collins in three dimensions. Power renders him without heroism or hagiography — the face direct, the expression composed, the surface treatment warm and varied in a way that resists the monumental. It is a portrait of a particular man rather than a symbol, which is exactly what Power was most gifted at producing.
The bust is held in the National Gallery of Ireland and has been reproduced in innumerable books, documentaries, and commemorative contexts since its making.
Significance: The definitive three-dimensional portrait of Michael Collins, made from Power’s own 1922 death mask and now in the National Gallery of Ireland.
The bust draws directly on Power’s 1922 death mask, making it the most anatomically accurate portrait of Collins in existence.