Museum Collection
Cathal Brugha Barracks
Visitors Centre, Dublin
Cathal Brugha Barracks, an active Irish Defence Forces installation in Rathmines, Dublin, holds works connected to Albert G. Power and to the man for whom the barracks is named.
The barracks' Visitors Centre holds Power's death mask of Cathal Brugha, made shortly after his death on 7 July 1922 — the first of the extraordinary sequence of revolutionary death masks Power produced that year. A cast of his death mask of Michael Collins is also displayed here, connecting the two Civil War antagonists within the same institutional walls.
Brugha — born Charles William St John Burgess — was Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers and Minister for Defence in the First Dáil. The barracks named in his honour, and the presence of his death mask there, makes this one of the most historically resonant sites connected to Power's work.
Works at This Location
Death Mask of Cathal Brugha
Plaster
Brugha was mortally wounded on O'Connell Street on 5 July 1922, two days after the outbreak of the Civil War, and died the following day. Power's mask was the first in his sequence of revolutionary death masks made that summer.
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Death Mask of Michael Collins (cast)
Plaster cast
A cast of Power's Collins death mask is displayed alongside the Brugha mask here — an evocative pairing of two men who had fought on opposite sides of the same conflict, now held within the same institutional walls.
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