Power’s most celebrated public commission and the work by which he is most widely known. The seated figure of the Connacht writer Pádraic Ó Conaire was unveiled in Eyre Square, Galway, in 1935, and has remained one of the most emotionally resonant objects in Irish public life.
The choice of pose was deliberate and unconventional. Rather than the elevated, upright stance typical of memorial sculpture of the period, Power shows Ó Conaire seated on a low plinth, elbows on knees — the posture of a man in conversation, or in thought. There is no symbolic attribute: no book, no pen, nothing that announces his literary identity. He is, simply, present.
The bronze was stolen in 1999 in circumstances never fully explained, causing distress throughout Galway and beyond. A temporary fibreglass cast was installed while the original was sought. The bronze was eventually recovered — damaged — from a Dublin yard, restored, and returned to Eyre Square.
The episode demonstrated something that Power could not have anticipated when he made the work: that a sculpture’s meaning is not given at the moment of its creation, but accumulates through decades of proximity, habitual attention, and civic use.
Notes on the Commission
The memorial was commissioned by a public subscription organised in the years following Ó Conaire’s death in 1928. Power was chosen for the commission on the strength of his reputation as a portraitist capable of working with intimacy and restraint — qualities that suited both the subject and the location.
The casting was overseen by Power himself, as was characteristic of his practice. The surface treatment — warmer and more varied in tone than much contemporary civic bronze — is a direct result of his hands-on involvement in the foundry process.