General Jean Lafayette
Artist
Andrew O'Connor
(1874 - 1941)
Date1984
MediumBronze
Dimensions167 x 167 x 69 cm
ClassificationsSculpture
Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery.
Cast in 1984 from a plaster donated by Andrew O'Connor (the Artist), 1941.
Object number1709
Description'General Jean Lafayette' is a reduced model for O'Connor's 'Lafayette Monument’, which was commissioned by the Board of Estimates of Baltimore. Although the equestrian statue was commissioned in 1918 and a plaster model was completed in 1922 when O'Connor was still living in Paxton, Massachusetts, the monument was not erected in Washington Place, Baltimore until about 1929. According to O'Connor in the 'Worcester Gazette', 1922, the work is intended 'not only [as] a memorial to the distinguished French Officer in the Colonial army, but a monument to romance, beauty and vitality, to love of liberty, to the noble thoughts which animated this boy of the eighteenth century; no dull and stupid repose, but youth, energy and pride'. Lafayette was only eighteen when he came to America from France. This work is one of the most animated of O'Connor's many public monuments for American sites, which include such works as 'General Lew Wallace' (1909) in the statuary hall of the United States Capitol in Washington and 'Abraham Lincoln' (1918) in Springfield, Illinois, the president's birthplace.(Extract from 'Images and Insights', Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1993, p. 238)
On View
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