When the statue of slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston was pulled down, defaced, and dumped in Bristol Harbour in 2020, few people spared a thought for its creator, the Meath-born sculptor John Cassidy.
But in the latest issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Lucasta Miller expresses admiration for the artistry Cassidy invested in his work, undeserved as it may have been by the subject.
She also wonders to what extent the statue – which like much of Cassidy’s output was influenced by Rodin, especially in this case The Thinker – reflected his own background:
“As an Irishman he cannot, one suspects, have had a completely uncomplicated attitude to British colonialism. Was his image of a thoughtful Colston surreptitiously designed to make us think, or was it just another commission for a cash-strapped artist?”
The answer seems to have been a bit of both. Born the son of a Slane farmer, on New Year’s Day 1860, Cassidy moved to Dublin in early adulthood for work, and after doing night classes in art, may or may not have travelled on scholarships to Milan or Paris.
But he certainly studied at the Manchester School of Art from 1883, later taught there, and spent the rest of his life in that Lancashire city. It was from his new home, in 1899, he wrote a letter back to Dublin that may carry a hint of his attitude to British colonialism:
“I have read with great interest of your intention to deservedly honour Wolfe Tone by the erection of a statue to his memory,” he told the commissioners in question.
“Myself an Irishman, I am of course eager to participate in the movement and would appreciate the honour of being allowed to submit a sketch model . . . I should use my ablest efforts to produce a creation . . . worthy of the cause”.
On the other hand, two years earlier, he had also produced a statue of Queen Victoria, for a site in Belfast, which sent the local Newsletter – a fervently loyalist newspaper - into raptures of approval:
“He has sought to represent Queen Victoria proffering peace to coming generations – surely a most appropriate idea, considering the virtues and graces of which her Majesty is the embodiment . . . The features are admirably portrayed, and there is both in the expression of the face and in the bearing of the whole figure a skillful blending of queenly dignity and womanly tenderness, which makes the statue a fitting representation of ‘Victoria the Good’.”
Oh well. A decade later, in very different style, Cassidy sculpted what is probably his masterpiece. Adrift (1907) differs from most of his work until then in not being a simple portrait or memorial. Reminiscent of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, it features instead a family clinging to a tiny raft on storm-swept waves.
Cassidy himself described it as: “Humanity adrift on the sea of life, depicting sorrows and dangers, hopes and fears, and embodying the dependence of human beings upon one another, the response of human sympathy to human needs and the inevitable dependence upon Divine aid.”
But perhaps the sculpture’s central figure, a near naked man waving a sheet for help, may also represent the plight of the artist, trying to keep himself and his family afloat in a sea of ever-changing fashion and fortune.
Cassidy was very good at what he did, clearly, even the routine commemorative stuff, which as with Colston (and perhaps Queen Victoria), he sometimes elevated above its worth.
The context for Miller’s essay in the TLS was her experience in 2021 of being on a committee to advise on the commissioning a bust of John Keats, for his home place, at a time when public statuary had become a “vexed issue”.
The Colston statue incident was one cause for her anxiety. Another was an atrocious new statue of Princess Diana, at Kensington Gardens, which even the royalist Daily Telegraph denounced as “kitsch and archaic”.
Colston’s sculptor may have been “worrying successful at humanizing a subject who doesn’t deserve it,” Miller writes:
“But if you try to abstract form the moral murkiness, it’s difficult to deny that Cassidy’s work reflects the basic high standard of figurative craftsmanship routinely taught in Victorian art schools – and so signally lacking in the lumpen Diana of 2021.”
Cassidy never forgot where he came from, clearly. In 1912, he put a fellow Slane man, the impoverished young poet Francis Ledwidge, in touch with a local patron of the arts, Lord Dunsany, who went on to support and publish Ledwidge before his early death in Flanders a few years later.
But Cassidy lived out the rest of his days in Manchester and died there in 1939. According to an obituary in the Manchester City News, he “had become something of a legend, and all over Britain old pupils and colleagues spoke of him, his work, his mannerisms and his Irish witticisms as they might speak of an old master”.
His gravestone, in the Catholic section of Manchester’s Southern Cemetery, makes no mention of his origins, however. It describes him only as “John Cassidy Sculptor” and adds, in a simple epitaph: “His hands fashioned the beauty he saw.”