Lot 595: Jerome Connor (1874-1943) Bust of Elbert Hubbard,

Jerome Connor (1874-1943) Bust of Elbert Hubbard, c1929 Bronze on pink marble Base signed JEROME CONNOR Provenance: from the collection of the late Mr Justice Dermot Kinlen Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), author, Arts and Crafts promoter across the United States, and founder of the Roycroft community of artists and craft workers at East Aurora NY, was, after millionaire Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, perhaps the best known American victim of the Lusitania sinking in May 1915. Later, his son Elbert Hubbard II, together with William and Gertrude Vanderbilt (Mrs Harry Payne Whitney) for that family, Franklin D Roosevelt and others, decided to honour the victims and their rescuers, and promote world peace, by erecting a Lusitania Peace Memorial in Cobh, county Cork. At the same time, Roycrofters across America proposed a Hubbard memorial for their East Aurora campus. Connor was given both commissions. He and his wife Anne, both Roycrofters, knew the Hubbards well, and when at East Aurora in 1899-1902 Connor had made several portraits of Hubbard and his family. The monument, a heroic bronze, showing Hubbard in bohemian attire seated informally on a rock, was completed in Dublin in 1929, and unveiled in East Aurora in June 1930. Two smaller studies survive, a larger 1930 studio plaster, now in the National Gallery of Ireland (inventory no. 8348, also cast in bronze for the Jerome Connor Trust), and this unique small scale bust. The two differ in some costume detail, but both show the same pose of the head, matching that of the East Aurora statue. Giollamuire Ó Murchú €2000-4000