In 1933, Albert Power produced decorative stonework for the National Maternity Hospital on Holles Street, Dublin — founded in 1894, as recorded on the stone lintel above the hospital’s main entrance.
Power’s contribution included an ornate carved surround for the clock set into the building’s pediment, framed with a shell motif above and cornucopia-style festoons of fruit and flowers swept down either side, and a small carved cherub head set into the keystone directly above the entrance doors.
This domestic, civic-institutional commission sits alongside Power’s other architectural work of the period — the Hibernian Bank (1921), the Royal Bank of Ireland (1919), and the Gresham Hotel (1926) — showing the breadth of building types, from commercial premises to hospitals, that called on his decorative stone carving in 1920s and 1930s Dublin.