About twenty or more years ago I was standing here when a tour guide arrived with a group of tourists and when asked why the park was named Stephen’s Green the guide explained that it was named in honour of Stephen Green the famous Irish patriot. I really hope that the tourist did not leave Dublin believing that this was a statue of Stephen Green rather than Wolfe Tone.
At the Merrion Row corner of St. Stephen’s Green you will find a bronze statue of Theobald Wolfe Tone, the leader of the 1798 rebellion. Flanked by monoliths, it was immediately nicknamed ‘Tonehenge’ by the local population.
In 1964 the architect Noel Keating and the sculptor Edward Delaney won a competition to create the Wolfe Tone monument at the corner of St Stephen’s Green. That year Delaney was selected to make the Thomas Davis memorial on College Green.
Tone stands alone in front of a collection of granite monoliths, which prompted the nickname Tonehenge. It should be noted that there is a companion piece, the Famine Memorial, located just behind the granite pillars.
Theobald Wolfe Tone, posthumously known as Wolfe Tone (20 June 1763 – 19 November 1798), was a leading Irish revolutionary figure and one of the founding members of the United Irishmen, and is regarded as the father of Irish republicanism and leader of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. He was captured at Letterkenny port on 3 November 1798, and he died sixteen days later for reasons that are disputed.
and distracting so I am pleased to see that the have been removed.
Edward Delaney (1930–2009) was an Irish sculptor born in Claremorris in County Mayo in 1930. His best known works include the 1967 statue of Wolfe Tone and famine memorial at the northeastern corner of St Stephen’s Green in Dublin and the statue of Thomas Davis in College Green, opposite Trinity College Dublin. These are both examples of lost-wax bronze castings, his main technique during the 1960s and early 1970s.
Though they do exhibit some of his trademark expressionism, the statues of Wolfe Tone and Thomas Davis are less abstract than was most of his work at the time; the famine memorial is more typical in this regard. However, arts writer Judith Hill points out that these statues make no attempt at an exact likeness of the figures they portray, instead, they communicate the public stature of their subjects and, indeed, the public role of memorial statues through their proportions and scale. In this way, it is argued, they mark the transition from memorial and public art.
What all Edward Delaney’s work shares is robustness, in an Irish Times review of his 2004 retrospective, arts writer Aidan Dunne described his bronzes as robust, but having an awkwardness, a tenderness about them.
From 1980 onwards, Edward Delaney concentrated on large scale environmental pieces and stainless steel works in Carraroe, County Galway. The Royal Hibernian Academy held a retrospectives of his work in 1992 and again in 2004.
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