On a pedestal – An Irishman’s Diary on the sculptor John Henry Foley
John Henry Foley in 1863. Photograph: Ernest Edwards
The O’Connell monument and those of Henry Grattan on College Green and Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith in front of Trinity College are some of the finest pieces of public sculpture in Dublin city. The man who created them, John Henry Foley, was born 200 years ago on May 24th. He was the first major Irish sculptor, and it is all the more remarkable that he became so given that he “received but a slender education, and such as he afterwards acquired was through his own industry and love of reading”, according to Walter Strickland’s Dictionary of Irish Artists (1913).
He was born in Montgomery Street in Dublin, which has since been renamed Foley Street in his honour. His father, originally from Winchester, worked as a glassblower and later had a grocer shop on nearby Mecklenburg (now Railway) Street. His mother, Eliza Schrowder Byrne, was a stepdaughter of Benjamin Schrowder, a sculptor who worked on Gandon’s Custom House and who was Foley’s first teacher.