Soon visitors to 43 St. Stephen’s Green will be greeted not only by Thea Gilien, Claire Mc Gowan, and BC Ireland director Mike Cronin, but by the likes of W. B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney. A cast bronze sculpture of Ireland’s four Nobel Laureates for Literature (to date!) by renowned Irish sculptor Rowan Gillespie is being installed in the foyer. A gift of Brian P. Burns and his wife, Eileen, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Boston College’s acquisition of the Georgian townhouse, which Burns helped to facilitate, the sculpture is a twin of the 2011 version that Burns commissioned Gillespie to create for the John J. Burns Library, named for his father. Burns Library holds premier collections of manuscripts and first and early editions of all four writers, as well as the archives of other notable Irish poets and novelists.
Gillespie’s work appears in numerous locations around Dublin, including a figure of James Joyce in the garden of Merrion Hotel, Famine on the Custom House Quay, Proclamation across from Kilmainham Gaol, and most recently Failing Better for the new Pearse Street entrance to Trinity College. An article about his Laureates sculpture by Burns Librarian Christian Dupont appeared in a recent issue of the Irish Arts Review (“Noble Nobels,” Spring 2019).