Details of Sculptor

Surname

Farrell

Alternative Surname

First Name

Sir Thomas PRHA

Initial of Surname

F

Year of Birth/Baptism

1827?

Flourished

Year of Death

1900

Biographical Details

Thomas Farrell, the third son of Terence Farrell, was the most successful sculptor working in Ireland in the second half of the 19th century. The first son of the family to be given a formal training outside his father’s studio, he was admitted as a student at the modelling school of the Royal Dublin Society in 1842. The following year he was awarded a prize in the category ‘Original Design in Clay’ and he won premiums from the Royal Irish Art Union in 1844 and 1846 (89, 90).He exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1849, and continued as a frequent exhibitor there until his death.
His first major work was the monument to Archbishop Daniel Murray (3). This prestigious commission was won in competition with John Hogan, an experienced and well-known sculptor, with a strictly neoclassical design comprising a kneeling figure of the Archbishop, flanked by two allegorical figures, Meekness and Prudence. After securing the commission Farrell visited Italy. Strickland states that he travelled there to choose the marble for the Murray monument and whilst in the country took the opportunity to visit Rome and Florence. Murphy suggests that the visit was primarily a study trip. By the summer of 1854 he was back in Dublin and starting work on the portrait statue of the Archbishop, erected in the Pro-Cathedral the following year. He was assisted by his younger brother, Michael, who carved the figure of Prudence shortly before he contracted a fever of which he died in 1855.
This early success brought Farrell prosperity and a degree of artistic and domestic independence. In 1856 he moved to Warrington Place on the south side of the city, near the canal, though he apparently continued to work at the family studio in Gloucester Street in north Dublin. A second significant commission was offered to him later in the 1850s when he was invited to model one of the bronze reliefs for the Wellington Testimonial in Phoenix Park (88). Other reliefs were commissioned from Joseph Robinson Kirk and John Hogan. Farrell’s model, depicting the the fall of the Earl of Uxbridge at the Battle of Waterloo, an incident which inspired the English cavalry to attack the French soldiers with renewed energy, was completed by March 1860 and sent to be cast at Thomas Potter’s foundry in South Molton Street, London. The casting was completed the following spring but Farrell was appalled by the quality of Potter’s work. He wrote: ‘so battered and butchered is every part of it, that I had considerable difficulty in recognising any of my own work at all ... Thank Heaven, it is gone up to such a height, for I would not for any consideration that it was seen on the ground as my work’ (Letter to General Sir Thomas Larcom, 1 April 1861, quoted by Murphy 1993, 198-9).
As the most prominent sculptor in Dublin from the 1860s, Farrell was employed on a succession of public statues, most of them for sites in the city. He found patrons both in the Catholic and Protestant communities, and Murphy suggests that his commissions for portrait statues of Protestants, 'were frequently of a particular type and seem related to his being an Irish Catholic’ (Murphy 1993, 200). Many of these were of individuals who took a particularly active interest in Irish culture and politics. Examples include the statues of Sir John Gray, a Protestant nationalist, the proprietor of The Freeman’s Journal and an active member of the Dublin Corporation, who was commemorated in recognition of his work in improving the city’s water supply (32); Sir Robert Stewart, a renowned organist and professor of music with a deep interest in ancient Irish music (41); and William Smith O’Brien, a Protestant revolutionary nationalist (26). In 1864 Farrell competed for the national monument to Daniel O’Connell, submitting a design for a three-tiered edifice consisting of a seated statue of O’Connell, with figures of Erin, Law, Patriotism and Eloquence seated around the pedestal and semi-reclining personifications of different aspects of Liberty at the base (25). He was unsuccessful and the commission, the most significant of its time in Ireland, was awarded to John Henry Foley.
The O’Connell monument was not completed until 1883 but a model of Foley’s work was put on display in Dublin’s City Hall in 1867 and this may have had an impact on Farrell’s monument to Cardinal Paul Cullen, unveiled in 1882 (11). Like Foley’s O’Connell, Farrell’s statue of Cullen stands on a drum-pedestal with a frieze of figures in high-relief. Here the figures represent the various religious institutions, social, medical and educational, founded by the Cardinal. Other church monuments by Farrell include a relief of a soldier dying on the battlefield at Sebastopol, erected in memory of Lieutenant Thomas Kidd in Armagh Cathedral; a bust of Cardinal Newman in the University Church, Dublin and a reclining effigy of Archbishop Whately in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin (4, 15, 6). He also executed a number of monuments in Glasnevin Cemetery, including one to members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which features three symbolic figures Erin, Fidelity and Patriotism (12).
Farrell was a diffident and shy man who seems to have been uncomfortable at public occasions such as unveiling ceremonies and the banquets which sometimes accompanied them. He was nonetheless actively involved in the Royal Hibernian Academy for many years. In 1860 he was elected a full member, by-passing the associate stage under new rules introduced that year. He was appointed professor of sculpture in 1862, but the appointment was not renewed and passed to J R Kirk at the end of the year. He was subsequently a Council member on three occasions, auditor for one year and treasurer for twenty-two, until finally he was elected president in 1893. Two years later he was again appointed professor of sculpture at the Academy, which at that stage of his life was effectively an honorary position. He also served on the board of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1876, and in May 1894 he was knighted.
The Farrell sculpture yard remained in Gloucester Street, though Thomas moved from his house in Warrington Place to Mountjoy Square in 1881 and in 1895 to Redesdale House, a large property in Stillorgan, a suburb south of Dublin. When he died there on 2 July 1900 his 3 surviving brothers were living with him. His obituary in The Irish Times paid tribute to a ‘great genius’, the successor of Foley and Hogan, whose death left a gap which it would be hard to fill (The Irish Times, 5 July 1900, quoted by Murphy 1993, 206). This view was not shared by Potterton, who later wrote that Farrell was ‘by no means a sculptor of genius, or even of any great imaginative powers; so that the majority, if not all, of his statues are extremely boring' (Potterton 1975, 44).
EH
Literary References: Strickland 1, 1913, 335-40; Crookshank 1966, 311; Potterton 1975, 44; Murphy 1992-3, 196-206; Grove 10, 1996, 815 (Murphy)