Charles Stewart Parnell

Artist Augustus Saint-Gaudens

 

Date 1911

Dimensions Figure 240cm, pillar 900cm

Materials Figure: Bronze

Pillar: Ashlar granite

Commission Paid for by public

subscription

 

 

Sackville Street was also to be the location for one of the last sculptural

initiatives in the city before independence when, in 1899, the foundation stone

was laid for a monument dedicated to Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891).

On 3 January 1882 a resolution was passed by Dublin City Council to grant the

freedom of the city to Parnell. Later that year, on 15 August 1882 Parnell

arrived at the unveiling ceremony for the O’Connell Monument accompanying

the archbishop in his ceremonial carriage. A scene which would seem unlikely

as subsequent events in Parnell’s personal life unfolded.

The plan for the Parnell monument was instigated by John Redmond (who

succeeded Parnell as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party) partly as a

symbolic gesture to honour the ‘uncrowned king of Ireland’ and to consolidate

his aspiration to reunite the constitutionalists under his own leadership. The

monument would be funded through the efforts of a voluntary body, the Parnell

Committee founded in 1898. The committee was chaired by Lord Mayor Daniel

Tallon, other members were Count Plunkett, Dr. J.E. Kenny, John Redmond,

MP, Thomas Baker (manager of the Irish Independent) and the Hon. Edward

Archive Consultants O’Connell Street Monument Report – Nov 2003 17

Blake, MP20. The address of the committee was 39 Upper Sackville Street

where the offices of the United Irish League were recorded. It was first

proposed to place the monument on the site of the Thomas Moore statue,

which they offered to remove elsewhere at their own expense.21 The City

Council refused to grant this site however and directed that the monument be

erected on a site near the Rotunda Hospital,22 where it now stands in answer

the O’Connell statue at the south end and terminates the parade of nationalist

statues on the primary thoroughfare of the capital.

Owing to the split in the party over the O’Shea case, the ceremony for the

laying of the foundation stone on 8 October 189923, was marred by a

conspicuous absence of most of the I.P.P., city and county magistrates, as

well as Roman Catholic bishops and clergy, proceedings were also marred by

heckling from extreme nationalists against Redmond’s weak plea for unity24.

Financial support was going to be hard come by in Ireland and Redmond was

forced to tour America with a representative of the Parnell monument

committee to raise funds.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens25, an Irish-born sculptor and the most eminent in the

art of public monuments in the United States, accepted the commission. It was

however to prove a protracted project. The demand for Saint-Gaudens’ work in

America was such that completion of the Parnell project would be fraught with

delays. At around the same time he was working on the equestrian statue of

General Sherman (1903, New York).

Archive Consultants O’Connell Street Monument Report – Nov 2003 18

For the Parnell monument, he made a scale replica of the buildings and

square in Dublin and also a full scale model of the monument in wood in a field

near his studio26. In 1904 there was a disastrous fire in his studio and only the

head of the statue was saved. He appears to have been bitten by the

nationalist zeal and is quoted as saying ‘More than all the rest of my losses in

the fire I regret, as an Irishman, the loss of the Parnell statue.’27 SaintGaudens planned a monument which would integrate sculpture and

architecture. The original concept of a bronze figure of about 8 feet high placed

by a bronze table was to be set against a 30 foot pyramid. As this form was

already utilised in the Wellington monument obelisk, Saint-Gaudens and the

architect Henry Bacon proposed a triangular shaft almost double the height of

the original. Saint-Gaudens developed a detailed picture of Parnell from

photographs, cartoons and accounts of his habits, the clothes he wore and his

demeanour. He indicated to Redmond that the entire monument should be ‘as

simple, impressive and austere as possible, in keeping with the character of

the Irish cause as well as of Parnell.’

He finally presented Parnell in what he considered a noble and calm manner,

depicted in an open frock coat, with one hand resting on a table and the other

extended dramatically as if making a point at a parliamentary debate. In an

incongruous gesture to the neo-classical programme of decoration on the

nearby Rotunda, the base of the monument is decorated in swags and

bucrania, resulting in an odd proximity of ox-sculls to Parnell’s feet.

The shaft of the monument is constructed in undecorated ashlar granite. The

stone was described in an article in The Irish Architect and Craftsman as

Archive Consultants O’Connell Street Monument Report – Nov 2003 19

Shantalla granite from Galway with an “inlaid trefoil of Barna granite embracing

the base and pedestal”.28 The names of the thirty-two counties and provinces

on bronze plaques around the base were part of an earlier scheme for the

four-sided pyramid, representing the four provinces and were retained for the

revised triangular shaft.

There is a stark contrast between the presentation of Parnell and O’Connell,

the former does not symbolically rise above political structures, but tries to find

a new form of expression, accessible to the people in the location of the figure.

Redmond chose a passage from one of the more extreme Parnell speeches

for the inscription, ‘…no man has the right to say to his country, “thus far shalt

thou go and no further” and we have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra to

the progress of Ireland’s nationhood, and we never shall’.

On 1 October 191129, the monument was unveiled to large crowds, many of

whom had been absent from the foundation stone ceremony, but there were

also strikes and marches indicating the unrest to follow.

In June 1913, John Redmond, as Secretary to the Parnell Monument

Committee, wrote to the City Council requesting the council to take the

Monument into their charge, ‘….on behalf of the Citizens of Dublin….’30 The

Council agreed to this request and since then, the Parnell Monument has been

in the care of the Corporation of Dublin.

Archive Consultants O’Connell Street Monument Report – Nov 2003 20

The inscription on the monument reads:

To Charles Stewart Parnell

No Man has a right to fix the

Boundary to the march of a nation

No man has a right

To say to his country

Thus far shat thou

Go and no further

We have never

Attempted to fix

The ne-plus-ultra

To the progress of

Ireland’s nationhood

And we never shall

At the base of the statue the Irish inscription reads:

Go roimhigid Dia

Éire da Clainn

Done