The removal of the statue of Queen Victoria from Leinster House in 1948 may or may not have been a “worthy initiative”, as a writer to the Irish Times Letters page suggested last week.
But either way, the monument’s fate – in its rise as well as its fall – was a tragedy for the man who created it. Long before the queen was deposed from her throne for eventual transportation to Australia, the poor sculptor had been driven into exile by the debacle.
John Hughes (1865-1941) was born the son of a carpenter in Dublin’s north inner city but, from his earliest years at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and later the South Kensington school in London, he seemed destined for greatness in the world of sculpture.
He was a friend of WB Yeats and George “AE” Russell and was worshipped by students including the stained-glass artist Sarah Purser and Beatrice Elvery (later to become Lady Glenavy and, among other things, mother of Irish Times diarist Patrick Campbell).
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As the Dictionary of Irish Biography notes, Russell said of one of Hughes’s early masterpieces, Finding of Eurydice (1898), “the precision and delicacy of the modelling is something quite new in Ireland”.
But what should have been the peak of the sculptor’s career was doomed to coincide with what the Chinese call interesting times. And when he landed the prestige commission to create an Irish monument to the recently deceased queen in 1903, it was to become a curse that would haunt the rest of his life.
It wasn’t his fault that Victoria had features only a mother could love. Hughes sculpted her with his usual finesse, adding a trio of poetic figures, representing Ireland in war, peace, and famine to leaven the work.
Nor could be he be blamed that the monument was designed for the RDS headquarters in Leinster House, at a time when nobody could imagine this would soon be the seat of an independent Irish parliament.
Above all, Hughes had no control over the monument’s ultimate proportions, which greatly exceeded what he intended. The key influence there was the architect Sir Thomas Drew, who had been knighted in the queen’s penultimate honours list and who believed her memorial should be on a grand scale, reflecting the glory of the British Empire.
Hughes despaired at the bombastic plan and, although never wealthy, offered to replace it with a smaller sculpture at his own expense. But the huge monument was erected regardless in 1908, just as a new, iconoclastic generation was poised to take power in the building behind it.
His expanded work, by then dominating the space between the National Library and National Museum, would come to be despised not just as a mockery of Irish independence but as an obstruction to another rising force of that era, the motor car.
The sculptor’s bad luck continued when in 1909 he was chosen to memorialise another towering figure in British history, former prime minister and “Grand Old Man” of politics William Gladstone.
The first World War and the rise of a more militant nationalism prevented the finished work ever rising in Dublin. It was relocated to Gladstone’s home estate in England instead.
Hughes had done much of his work on the Victoria monument in Paris. Disillusionment with what had happened to it helped keep him there and elsewhere on mainland Europe in later years, living with his sisters in Florence and Paris and abandoning his vocation.
He was also gifted in music. Of his rising years, as a teacher in Dublin, Beatrice Elvery recalled that he used to entertain classes by whistling such melodies as Gluck’s Orfeo, “with a quality of sound just like a flute”, an instrument he also played. He would read stories too, so thrillingly (Elvery said) “that we forgot to model and the model forgot to pose; we all gathered around him to listen and he was as excited as we were.”
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In later years, he fell back on music to make a meagre living. It was said he had “lost heart” and now earned money “playing a flute in Paris cinemas”.
Hughes was outlived by his other masterpieces including Man of Sorrow and Madonna and Child, in Loughrea Cathedral. But mockery of his Victoria monument outlived him too. When its end came, it was scattered in at least three directions: the queen (after decades in storage) to Sydney; the subsidiary figures to Dublin Castle; the base stone to recycling.
As late as 1960, in a newspaper article headlined “The tragedy of John Hughes”, the historian Denis Gwynn confessed not knowing when or where the sculptor had died and appealed for more information from readers.
It later emerged that Hughes spent his final days in Nice, where he shared part of the fate of WB Yeats, who had predeceased him in a neighbouring corner of the Côte d’Azur. Like Yeats’s, Hughes’s remains were buried in a local cemetery and, when unclaimed within the statutory period, transferred to a public ossuary. Unlike the poet’s, they were never brought back to Ireland.
