Born near Annascaul, Co. Kerry, in 1874, Connor was thirteen when the family emigrated to Massachusetts. Shortly after their arrival his father died so Connor left home to seek work, beginning first in New York where he found employment as a sign-painter, a machinist and then as a stone-cutter for a monument company in Massachusetts, where he worked on the South Hadley Civil War Memorial. During this time he made additional money as a prizefighter under the name of Patrick J. O’Connor. He al
so trained as a bronze-founder and assisted Roland Hinton Perry (1870-1941), in the casting of The Fountain of Neptune bronzes for the Library of Congress, Washington DC, all before he was twenty-one years old.
Having worked for a period at the Roycroft Institution, East Aurora, New York, where he produced commercial terracotta busts. Connor graduated to “high” art via portraiture, producing Civil War memorials and various monuments. His Irish-American connections brought him the Robert Emmet commission, and later, the Lusitania Memorial commission, funded by the Lusitania Peace Memorial committee and to be sited at Cobh. He was also commissioned to carry out a full length statue of Elbert Hubbard, founder of the Roycroft Institution and personal friend of Connor’s who died in the sinking of the Lusitania. On the strength of these two commissions he returned to Ireland in 1925, taking a studio on the North Circular Road in Dublin. However, the designs for the Lusitania Memorial were frequently changed, although whether the decision of change came from the Lusitania committee or the sculptor himself is unclear. Conceived of as a symbolic appeal for world peace, the Memorial was to occupy Connor for nearly eight years, from 1929-1936, and although he had produced several designs, plans, scale models and some full-size symbolic figures it remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1943. (The monument was not finally completed until 1968).
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