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Life
[var. 1864]; b. Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, son of artisan-sculptor; ed. Dublin Metropolitan School of Art; Ropyal College of Art, S. Kensington, under Edouard Lantéri; Academie Julian and Colarossi’s Academy, Paris; taught in art schools in Nottingham; displayed in Dublin The Bard Oisin and Niamh (1895), figures based on Yeat’s Wanderings of Oisin; also Lia Fail (RHA 1897); MRHA; returned to fill John Hughes’ position as professor of Sculpture in Dublin on Yeats’s instigation, 1902; joined Gaelic Society of Dublin Art School and modelled subjects from Irish mythology; |
commissioned figure of ‘insurgent peasant’ with pike (croppy) for Wexford 1798 memorial, 1903 “Wexford Pikemen” (unveiled 1905); head of Mangan at St. Stephen’s Green, 1906; completed figure of Fr. Murphy exhorting an insurgent, 1907, unveiled Enniscorthy 1908; also member of Royal Soc. of British Sculptors; sculpted “Death of Cuchulainn”, in 1911-12, selected by de Valera in 1930, and purchased by the Government as a memorial to the 1916 Rising, being unveiled in the GPO in April 1935 (an enlarged version being exhibited in New York World Fair, 1939); sculpted St Finbarr for UCC Chapel; |
statues of Rowan Hamilton and Robert Boyle for Royal College of Science, Merrion St.; completed war memorials for Four Courts, 1920; commissioned bust of Kevin O’Higgins; bust of William Redmond, Wexford 1930; busts of Patrick Pearse and Cathal Brugha commissioned by Fianna Fail govt.; Yeats refers to his “Death of Cuchulainn” obliquely in “The Statues” - or to the idea of Cuchulain in the Post Office - and Beckett more sarcastically employs it as a prop in Murphy; the Sheppard Papers in the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) contains letters to W. B. Yeats, &c.; there is a 1907 portrait of Sheppard by William Orpen [NGI]; Arthur Power was his pupil. DIB |
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Criticism
The following all by John Turpin: ‘Oliver Sheppard’s 1798 memorials in Co. Wexford’, The Irish Arts Review Yearbook (1990-91), pp.71-80; ‘Cuchulain Lives On’, Circa 69 (Autumn 1994), pp.26-31; ‘Oliver Sheppard’s Celtic Revival Images of Ireland’, Ireland of the Welcomes, 43, 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1994), pp.32-36; ‘Nationalist Ideology and Unionist Ideology in the Sculpture of Oliver Sheppard and Hugh Hughes, 1895-1939’, in Irish Review (Winter-Spring 1997), pp.62-75; ‘1798, 1898 and the Political Implications of Sheppard's Monuments', in History Ireland, VI, 2 (Summer 1998), p.45; Oliver Sheppard 1865-1941 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2001), 256pp.
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Commentary
Brian Fallon, reviewing John Turpin, Oliver Sheppard 1865-1941 (Dublin: Four Courts 2001), in Times Literary Supplement, gives details and remarks: b. Cookstown, son of artisan-sculptor; grew up in Dublin; trained in London and Paris in era of New Sculpture, primarily French and Realist with ties to Symbolists, and dominated by Rodin; ‘Rather surprisingly, Sheppard identified with Irish nationalism as well as the Literary Revival’; “Wexford Pikemen”; Cuchulain bronze in GPO, predating 1916 by some years, ‘placed Sheppard in the nationalist pantheon while his richly gifted contemporary, John Hughes, never lived down his association with Dublin Castle’; many portraits, statuettes, plaques, medals and other small pieces; genial and well-liked. ( “In Brief”, TLS, 3 Aug. 2001, p.28.)
Joan Fowler, ‘Sculpure’, in W. J. MacCormack, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture (1999), writes that Sheppard’s ‘naturalism ranges from the powerfully stated bust of James Clarence Mangan in St Stephen's Green to the absurdly idealised bust of Patrick Pearse (1936) in the Dáil Eireann Collection’ and that ‘he is closely associated with nationalism, largely because of his 1798 memorials at Wexford and Enniscorthy and his Death of Cuchulain (1911), which was later placed in the General Post Office in Dublin as a commemoration of the 1916 Rising. Such work is in stark contrast to contemporary European sculputre, where modelling had been rejected in favour of carving, an extensive of the “truth to the materiials” philosophy of early Modernism [which] eventually took root in Ireland throgh a younger generation which included Laurence Campbell (1911-68).’
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Quotations
‘Our country’s course seems certain ... The literary and artistic movement, in which I include the Gaelic movement, has changed the face of the town ... Thus in Dublin you would [have] known, the living forces of Ireland shaped and shaping.’ (Q. source; connected with his instauration as Professor of Sculpture in Dublin.)
Notes
Samuel Beckett makes comical use of Sheppard's statue of Cuchulain in the GPO [General Post Office], Dublin: ‘Suddenly he [Neary] flung aside his hat, sprang forward, seized the dying hero by the thighs and began to dash his head against his buttocks, such as they are (Murphy, 1938; 1963 Edn., p.28); Further, on his lapse of consciousness: ‘Then nothing more [...] until that deathless rump was trying to stare me down’, to which Wylie: ‘But there is no rump [How could there be? What chance would a rump have in the GPO?’ (Ibid., p.36).
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