Connections
Sheppard & Power
Teacher and student at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art
Oliver Sheppard (1864–1941) was Albert Power's principal teacher at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and one of the defining influences on his early development as a sculptor. The relationship between them — teacher and student, nationalist and nationalist, stone carver and modeller — is central to understanding how Power came to work as he did.
Oliver Sheppard RHA
Oliver Sheppard, Cú Chulainn, 1911/1935. GPO, Dublin. Photograph: public domain.
Oliver Sheppard (1864–1941) trained in London and Paris before returning to Ireland to teach sculpture at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where he remained for the rest of his career. He brought to Dublin an unusual exposure to Rodin's influence and a rigorous grounding in European academic sculpture that he passed on to a generation of Irish sculptors.
His best-known work is the bronze Cú Chulainn (1911, installed in the GPO in 1935), chosen by Éamon de Valera as a memorial to the 1916 Rising. His Inis Fáil (1901), a robed female figure, is held at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (no. 853) and represents his allegorical nationalist work at its most assured.
The Enniscorthy Memorial, 1907
A rare surviving photograph from 1907, held at the National Irish Visual Arts Library (NIVAL), NCAD, Dublin, shows Oliver Sheppard (left) with Albert Power assisting him in modelling the Enniscorthy memorial. Power was then in his mid-twenties and still in the formative years of his career. The photograph is one of the few direct visual records of the two men working together, and it documents Power's transition from student to professional collaborator.
The Enniscorthy commission was typical of the civic commemorative work that both men would pursue throughout their careers — a public monument in service of Irish historical memory, executed in stone, requiring sustained physical and technical labour over months of studio work.
What Power Learned
Power absorbed from Sheppard the technical foundations that underpinned all his subsequent work: the handling of bronze surfaces, the patient relationship between modelled clay and carved stone, the discipline of anatomical study. Sheppard was a slow and careful teacher, and Power became a slow and careful sculptor.
But the divergence between them is as instructive as the continuity. Where Sheppard's mature work ran toward the mythological and allegorical — Cú Chulainn, Inis Fáil — Power's output was almost entirely devoted to the particular: specific people, specific moments, specific faces. Power made portraits. The men they portrayed were real, named, recently dead. His commemorative instinct was biographical rather than symbolic.
This difference was not a rejection of Sheppard's example but a development beyond it — the result of a student so thoroughly trained that he had the confidence to go his own way.