VICTIMS A SCULPTURE BY ANDREW O’CONNOR – LOCATED IN MERRION SQUARE PARK
Unfortunately this is very relevant today.
When I first saw this more than ten years ago I thought that it was religious. I assumed that it depicted the removing of Jesus from the cross but while I was photographing a young girl asked her mother “is that God lying on a table” but since then I discovered that it is a lot more complicated that that.
This figurative sculpture, The Victims originated as a part of an unexecuted project for a war memorial for Washington, DC. The artist, Andrew O’Connor, conceived the idea of a huge war memorial in about 1918 and worked on the project until at least 1931.
However, no such monument was ever commissioned from him. The memorial consisted of three sections. The first of which was a group of three figures; a dead soldier strapped to a bier, mourned by his wife and his mother.
The figure of the dead soldier is The Victim, inscribed with the words; ‘Naked you came into the world’, the kneeling figure of The Wife with her hands clasped in prayer is variously called The Virgin or Mother of Sorrows. She is inscribed; ‘As cranes chanting their dolorous notes traverse the sky’ which is taken from a translation of Dante’s Inferno.
The standing female figure of The Mother of the Hero leans mournfully on her left elbow. The Victim was presented by the family of the sculptor to the Dublin Municipal Gallery (now Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane) in 1947 while the other two figures were presented to the gallery by the sculptor in 1938.
As is often the case with O’Connor’s work he produced other versions of some of these figures. A plaster version of The Victim is in the O’Connor family collection and a version of The Wife is at the Tate Gallery, London. The group would have been assembled with The Victim on a raised plinth, his wife kneeling at his head, his mother standing at his feet. The Victims was installed in 1976 following an exhibition to mark the centenary of the sculptor’s birth at Trinity College Dublin in 1974.
It would appear that it was not until 1974 that the three figures were displayed together as originally intended creating this uncompromising figurative representation of the victims of war.
Born in Worchester, Massachusetts, USA in 1874, Andrew O’Connor was the son of an Irish-American sculptor of the same name. Having studied under his father, O’Connor Jr. began working regularly on public monuments and funerary commissions in the United States.
In London c.1894-8, he met John Singer Sargent and assisted him on reliefs for his Boston Library decorations.
Andrew O’Connor’s style was formulated by the time he first visited Paris in about 1903 and his earliest work is in the Franco-American style which had become popular in America by 1900. Unlike the majority of other American sculptors he remained in France and worked from a Paris studio up to 1914. From 1906 on he exhibited annually at the Salon in Paris and at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 1907.
He then returned to the USA from 1914 to the mid 1920s and received numerous commissions for funerary and public monuments including the monument to Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois and the Theodore Roosevelt memorial at Glenview, Chicago. O’Connor spent his last years in Europe, first in Paris, then from c. 1932 between Ireland and London. He resided in Dublin for the last seven months of his life and passed away at his home at No.77 Merrion Square.
THERE ARE THREE ELEMENTS TO THE OSCAR WILDE SCULPTURE IN MERRION SQUARE – ARTIST DANNY OSBORNE
Normally it is difficult to photograph this sculpture because it is a major tourist attraction but today the park was close to empty.
Danny Osborne is an artist born in Dorset, England in 1949.He is a resident of Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada and Cork, Ireland. Osborne studied at Bournemouth & Poole College of Art. He is best known for his public sculptures, particularly his Oscar Wilde Memorial Sculpture “The Quare in the Square in Merrion Square Park” (originally commissioned by Guinness Ireland Group for £45,000 and located across from Ireland’s National Gallery.
I like to listen to the tourist guides explaining this public art installation to visitors from all parts of the world and how often their descriptions are incorrect or incomplete. But, of course, the exact details are not all that important.
In 2016 I mentioned that the restoration of the Oscar Wilde installation had been completed with the return of the two minor bronzes to their plinths. The stone plinths or pillars are covered in quotations from Wilde. One has a bronze figure of a pregnant naked woman kneeling on the top, while the other has a bronze male torso. One explanation is that they indicate Wilde’s ambiguous sexuality and aesthetic sensibilities.
At the time I also reported that the orientation of the female nude has been corrected. It should be noted that the female nude is Oscar’s wife [Constance Lloyd] who was pregnant when Oscar had his first homosexual encounter. Originally she was facing Oscar but someone tried to steal the bronze and when the park staff restored it they installed it facing the wrong direction and then the tour guides came up with stories to explain why she had turned her back on her husband.
She is facing a different direction now but I am not 100% convinced that one could claim that she is now facing Oscar. Maybe she should be on the other plinth.
The sculptor Danny Osborne used complementary colour stones and also sought out stones with varying textures to give a more lifelike representation of Oscar Wilde than you would find in a conventional statue.
Wilde’s jacket is green stone which is complemented by red stone cuffs. The sculpture includes two stone pillars which are covered in quotations by Oscar Wilde. Placed on top of the pillars are two sculptures, one of the sculptures is a bronze figure of a pregnant naked woman kneeling this represents Oscars wife Constance, while the other pillar has a bronze male torso.
The two pillars which flank Oscar Wilde on both sides are used to set out his thoughts, opinions, witticisms on art and life for all to see and judge. These quotes were selected by a mixture of poets, public figures, artists, and scientists, who use Wilde’s own words to pay tribute to him.
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