O'Shea

Irish family of stone-carvers. James O'Shea (b Ballyhooly, Co. Cork, fl c. 1845-68) worked with his brother John ( fl c. 1845-68) and their nephew Edward Whelan. In 1856 they were working for Sir Thomas Deane, Son & Woodward on the Museum for Trinity College, Dublin. Benjamin Woodward, deeply influenced by the writings of Ruskin, allowed his craftsmen great freedom in design and encouraged them to work from nature. As a result, the Museum is covered with lively, naturalistic and varied carvings of birds, animals and, most of all, plants. The team next worked for Woodward on the Oxford University Museum and threw themselves into the role of Ruskinian craftsmen: 'I would not desire better sport than putting monkeys cats dogs rabbits and hares ... on those jambes' wrote James O'Shea in 1859. They also worked for Woodward at Llys Dulas (1856-8), Anglesey, and the Crown Life Office (1856-8), New Bridge Street, London; for Alfred Waterhouse on the Assize Courts (from 1859), Manchester; and for John Hungerford Pollen on the church of the Assumption, at Rhyl in Wales. Whelan, at least, was working for T. N. Deane in Dublin in 1867. In 1878 a Mr O'Shea returned to complete the carving on the interior of the porch at the Oxford Museum. There was a certain disillusionment with the O'Sheas in England. Some architects found them 'unbearable', and Ruskin, speaking of James O'Shea in 1877, said that he 'too easily thought, in the pleasure of his first essays, that he had nothing to learn'. The quality of their surviving work, however, is very high.

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