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Jerome Connor (1876-1943)
The Singer
Bronze, 23cm high (9”)
Signed
Provenance: Purchased directly from the artist c.1942 by J.P.
Reihill Snr; Deepwell, Blackrock, Co. Dublin
This piece is identified as
The Singer
due to its close relationship
with a correspondingly titled piece in the Digby Collection. Its
smooth finish and concise modelling relate it most immediately
to The Boxer, sold in these rooms, May 2014, Cat. No. 37
€2,000 - 4,000
Born near Annascaul, Co. Kerry, in 1874, Connor was thirteen when
the family emigrated to Massachusetts. Shortly after their arrival his fa-
ther died so Connor left home to seek work, beginning first in New York
where he found employment as a sign-painter, a machinist and then as a
stone-cutter for a monument company in Massachusetts, where he worked
on the South Hadley Civil War Memorial. During this time he made addi-
tional money as a prizefighter under the name of Patrick J. O’Connor. He
also trained as a bronze-founder and assisted Roland Hinton Perry (1870-
1941), in the casting of
The Fountain of Neptune
bronzes for the Library of
Congress, Washington DC, all before he was twenty-one years old.
Having worked for a period at the Roycroft Institution, East Aurora, New
York, where he produced commercial terracotta busts. Connor graduated to
“high” art via portraiture, producing Civil War memorials and various mon-
uments. His Irish-American connections brought him the Robert Emmet
commission, and later, the Lusitania Memorial commission, funded by the
Lusitania Peace Memorial committee and to be sited at Cobh. He was also
commissioned to carry out a full length statue of Elbert Hubbard, founder
of the Roycroft Institution and personal friend of Connor’s who died in
the sinking of the Lusitania. On the strength of these two commissions he
returned to Ireland in 1925, taking a studio on the North Circular Road
in Dublin. However, the designs for the Lusitania Memorial were fre-
Jerome Connor (1876-1943)
The Deepwell Collection
quently changed, although whether the decision of change came from the
Lusitania committee or the sculptor himself is unclear. Conceived of as a
symbolic appeal for world peace, the Memorial was to occupy Connor for
nearly eight years, from 1929-1936, and although he had produced several
designs, plans, scale models and some full-size symbolic figures it remained
unfinished at the time of his death in 1943. (The monument was not finally
completed until 1968).
Connor undertook other commissions including a memorial for Tralee
entitled
The Pikeman,
to commemorate the 1798 Rising, and a figure of
Éire
, for the Killarney Poets Society in commemoration of Gaelic poets of
18
th
century Kerry. He also entered designs for a national coinage, became
friendly withW.B. Yeats and A.E. and exhibited in London where his work
was positively reviewed by leading critics. At the same time he kept up his
links with America, going back there regularly, (his wife and daughter had
returned there c.1934). In 1939 Connor was declared bankrupt; he lost
possession of his studio and the war cut him off from his family in America.
From this time until his death Connor exhibited in Dublin a remarkable
series of small bronzes which he described as “little pieces of free work”,
more loosely handled in their use of clay than his earlier output.They are of
particular importance as they are the product of a talent which first intro-
duced the processes of casting, chasing and patinating of bronze to Ireland.
