Life & Career
James Power was born in Dublin in 1920, the son of Albert George Power RHA, and grew up in a household where sculpture was not a profession but a way of life. He trained under his father and went on to become one of Ireland's most prolific monumental sculptors of the twentieth century, producing an extraordinary body of public, civic, and ecclesiastical work across six decades.
Where his father Albert had worked at the hinge point of the revolutionary period — making death masks of Collins, Griffith, and Brugha — James worked through the consolidation of the Irish state, producing the busts, memorials, and commemorative sculptures through which the new Ireland marked its own history.
Kilmainham Gaol Commissions
James Power's work for Kilmainham Gaol is among his most historically significant. The gaol, site of the executions following the 1916 Rising, became in the post-independence period a place of national commemoration, and Power was commissioned to produce a series of portrait busts of the men who had died there.
His bust of Edward 'Ned' Daly (1954) — the youngest commandant executed after the Rising, shot at twenty-five — and his bust of Peadar Kearney (1962), author of the Irish national anthem, are two of the most visited works in the gaol's collection. Both display the same quality of unsentimental directness that characterised his father's portraiture.
Matt Talbot Memorial
James Power's memorial to Matt Talbot — the Dublin labourer whose austere piety made him a figure of popular veneration — is one of his best-known public works. Talbot, who died in 1925 and whose cause for canonisation was opened by the Catholic Church, was a subject that suited Power's naturalistic approach: a working man of no great consequence in the world's terms, rendered with the same gravity he brought to revolutionaries and politicians.
Ecclesiastical & Memorial Work
Across his career James Power received sustained commissions from churches, public bodies, and civic organisations throughout Ireland. His range was broad — portrait busts, full figures, relief work, headstones, and architectural sculpture — and he maintained the family tradition of working directly in stone as well as casting in bronze.
He also continued work begun by his father, including completing elements of the Robert Emmet Bridge commission on Harold's Cross where the carved lettering was a collaboration between Albert and Oliver Power, with James involved in the broader memorial scheme.
Legacy
James Power died in Dublin in 2013, having worked as a sculptor for over sixty years. His works are distributed across Dublin and throughout Ireland — in public squares, church interiors, and civic buildings — forming one of the most substantial bodies of monumental sculpture produced by any Irish artist of his generation.
His Wikipedia page — one of the few dedicated to any member of the Power family — can be found at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Power_(sculptor) .
