Nenagh-born sculptor Mary Redmond, who sculpted the Fr Mathew statue on O’Connell Street in Dublin, died on this day in 1930.
Although Mary was born in Nenagh in 1863, the Redmond family moved to Meath while Mary was a child. Her father was a quarry worker and he secured employment in a limestone quarry there. The fact that Mary grew up beside a quarry influenced her choice of career as, from a young age, she modelled small animals and figures from the malleable quarry clay.
Mary’s talent was obvious and well-known Dublin sculptor Thomas Farrell was persuaded to allow the young girl (she was about 11-years-old) to work in his studio, where she made her first formal model, ‘a hand on a cushion’.
Farrell suggested that Mary attend the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. Although she was considered too young by the headmaster there, she was accepted and given tuition in drawing and painting. But as the young Mary wanted only to sculpt, she ran away. She told the headmaster that she would only go back if she were allowed to model clay and thus it was arranged that she was to bring in her own clay and ‘get a corner of the school to mess in’. Up until that time, there had been no modelling at the School of Art.
She first exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1880 when she was just 17 years old. In 1886/87, she travelled to Rome and Florence to further perfect her craft. In the late 1880s, she went to London where she modelled a bust of former Prime Minister William Gladstone. Unfortunately, this sculpture is now lost.
In 1890 an open competition was held for a statue of fellow Tipperary-native Fr. Theobald Mathew, the ‘apostle of temperance’, to be located in O'Connell St., Dublin. It attracted a large number of able contestants and Redmond won, quite an achievement for a woman artist at the time. She experienced, however, some frustrating setbacks. When the statue was nearing completion, her model arrived in an inebriated condition and she had to dismiss him. In revenge he returned at night and smashed the statue! Undaunted, Redmond began again and completed her work successfully. The monumental sculpture was unveiled before a huge crowd on 8 February 1893 and still stands today.
Mary Redmond later moved to Florence with her husband and she died there on this day in 1930.
Sources:
https://www.dib.ie/biography/redmond-mary-a7605
Mulholland, Rosa. “Mary Redmond, the Young Irish Sculptor.” The Irish Monthly 17, no. 194 (1889): 416–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20497929.
