WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 2 December 2019

164 ABOUT JOHN HENRY FOLEY John Henry Foley (1818-1874) was probably the most influential sculptor in Irish history. Born in Dublin, his breath-taking statues and equestrian masterpieces strode across city squares and parklands from Dublin to Kolkata to Virginia. His best-known Irish works include the Daniel O’Connell monument on O’Connell Street and the Father Mathew statue in Cork. Queen Victoria personally requested Foley create the statue of her beloved husband for the Albert Memorial in London. When Foley died, the queen de- creed that the gifted Irishman be buried in Westminster Abbey, an extraordinary honour for a man born into relative poverty in Dublin’s northside. A boy genius, he was educated at the Royal Dublin Society’s Drawing Schools at Leinster House, where he won numerous prizes in modelling. He moved to the Royal Academy in London to develop his career. In 1844 he won a contest to sculpt two figures for the newly restored Houses of Parliament at Westmin- ster. Thereafter he was never short of portrait commissions in Britain, Ireland and across the Empire. Foley’s works were fated to provoke controversy long after his death. His hat-trick of imperialist eques- trian statues in Kolkatta were dismantled after Indian independence. Several of his Irish works were also destroyed -his statue of Lord Dunkellin was heaved into the River Corrib by the people of Galway in 1922; his Dublin monuments to Lord Carlisle and General Gough were blown sky-high in the 1950s. The debate continues. In February 2018, the Oireachtas Petitions Committee rejected a petition seeking the removal of Foley’s statue of Prince Albert from Leinster Lawn by Dáil Éireann. To mark the bicentenary of Foley’s birth in 1818, filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle and historian Turtle Bunbury teamed up with the OPW to host ‘Ireland Salutes John Henry Foley’, an afternoon of film, talks and debate at Dublin Castle on Sunday 20 May 2018. The other speakers who gathered to consider Foley’s life and times were Dr Patrick Wallace, Dr Paula Murphy, Jason Ellis and Ronan Sheehan. FURTHER NOTES RELEVANT TO THE STATUETTE The statuette was subsequently purchased by Se Merry Doyle, director of the film ‘John Henry Foley - Sculptor of the Empire’, and co-curator, with Turtle Bunbury, of ‘Ireland Salutes John Henry Foley’, an event held at Dublin Castle last year to mark the bicentenary of Foley’s death birth It was engraved by George J. Stodart for the Art Journal in 1865. See attached. Foley’s Goldsmith was commissioned in 1859, erected in July 1863 and unveiled by the Earl of Carlisle, the Lord Lieutenant, on 3 January 1864. In January 1861, it went on show at Mr Cranfield’s Gallery, 115 Grafton Street, Dublin, in part to drum up more subscribers, earning much praise from Saunder’s Newsletter. (See their glowing report Saunders’s News-Letter, 30 January 1861, p.2) Queen Victoria and Prince Albert subscribed £100 to fund the work, as did Lord Carlisle. The total cost of the work was estimated at £1000. Among other subscribers was the polar explorer Sir Leopold McClintock. Two years earlier, he had led the party that discovered the fate of the Franklin Expedition. Among the scattered debris his men found on the ice were two books, a Bible and a copy of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield.’ The original plaster model was held by the Birmingham City Art Gallery, later incorporated into Birming- ham Museum. Badly damaged during a German air raid in 1940, it was subsequently destroyed.