Life
1865-1941 [var. 1864]; b. Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, son of artisan-sculptor;
ed. Dublin Metropolitan School of Art; Ropyal College of Art, S. Kensington,
under Edouard Lantéri; Academie Julian and Colarossi’s Academy,
Paris; taught in art schools in Nottingham; displayed in Dublin The Bard
Oisín and Niamh (1895), figures based on Yeat’s Wanderings of
Oisín; also Lia Fáil (RHA 1897); MRHA; returned to fill John
Hughes’ position as professor of Sculpture in Dublin on Yeats’s
instigation, 1902; joined Gaelic Society of Dublin Art School and modelled
subjects from Irish mythology; commissioned figure of ‘insurgent
peasant’ with pike (croppy) for Wexford 1798 memorial, 1903 “Wexford
Pikemen” (unveiled 1905); head of Mangan at St. Stephen’s Green,
1906; completed figure of Fr. Murphy exhorting an insurgent, 1907, unveiled
Enniscorthy 1908; also member of Royal Soc. of British Sculptors; sculpted
‘Death of Cúchulainn’, in 1911-12, selected by de Valera in
1930, and purchased by the Government as a memorial to the 1916 Rising,
being unveiled in the GPO in April 1935 (an enlarged version being exhibited
in New York World Fair, 1939); sculpted St Finbarr for UCC Chapel; statues
of Rowan Hamilton and Robert Boyle for Royal College of Science, Merrion
St.; completed war memorials for Four Courts, 1920; commissioned bust
of Kevin O’Higgins; bust of William Redmond, Wexford 1930; busts
of Patrick Pearse and Cathal Brugha commissioned by Fianna Fáil govt.;
Yeats refers to it obliquely in ‘The Statues’ - or to the idea
of Cuchulain in the Post Office - and Beckett more sarcastically employs
it as a prop in Murphy; the Sheppard Papers in the National College
of Art and Design (NCAD) contains letters to W. B. Yeats, &c.; there
is a 1907 portrait of Sheppard by William Orpen [NGI]; Arthur Power was
his pupil. DIB
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Criticism
John Turpin, ‘Oliver Sheppard’s 1798 memorials in Co. Wexford’,
The Irish Arts Review Yearbook (1990-91), pp.71-80.
John Turpin,‘Cuchulain Lives On’, Circa 69 (Autumn 1994), pp.26-31.
John Turpin, ‘Oliver Sheppard’s Celtic Revival Images of Ireland’, Ireland of the Welcomes, 43, 6 (Nov.-Dec. 1994), pp.32-36.
John Turpin, ‘Nationalist Ideology and Unionist Ideology in the Sculpture of Oliver Sheppard and Hugh Hughes, 1895-1939’, in Irish Review (Winter-Spring 1997), pp.62-75.
John Turpin, ‘1798, 1898 and the Political Implications of Sheppard's Monuments', in History Ireland, VI, 2 (Summer 1998), p.45; Oliver Sheppard 1865-1941 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2001), 256pp.
Brian Fallon, reviewing John Turpin, Oliver Sheppard
1865-1941 (Dublin: Four Courts 2001), in Times Literary Supplement, 3 Aug. 2001, p.28.)
Joan Fowler, ‘Sculpure’, in W. J. MacCormack, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture (1999).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)