Sculptors - the O'Shea Brothers.

      It is believed that the sculpted pieces in Thorncliffe are the works of the O'Shea brothers James and John of Ballyhooley, near Fermoy, equally assisted by their younger nephew Edward Whelan and are typical of their floral carvings and grotesqueries that can also be seen at TDC (1853-57) and the Kildare Street Club in Dublin and Oxford University, England,(1854-1861). These dates indicatethat they travelled much between the two countries.

      Stonemason Daniel O'Shea moved from Callan to Ballyhooley to work at Lord Listowel's Convamore House initially. After Catholic Emancipation in Ireland in 1829 centuries of opression gave way to a rise in the building and restoring of Catholic Churches. Daniel and his Ballyhooley-born sons soon become involved in stonemasonry projects on the new Catholic church in nearby Castletownroche.

      James, John and nephew Edward were all extremely talented stonemasons. Their work visible today in the Museum at Trinity College, Dublin is of the highest quality and great originality. There their carvings on corbels, capitals and columns were made from life with plants being brought up from the Botanic Garden in Glasnevin - strongly influenced by John Ruskins belief that architecture should be shaped by the energies of the natural world.

      It is very possible that the O’Sheas came to work for Deane and Woodward around the late 1840s. The training of artisans was something of a hobbyhorse with Sir Thomas Deane, as he admitted in his lecture on sculpture to the RIAI in January 1851, and the O’Sheas may well have been protégés of his at the Cork School of Design.

      There is some evidence indicating that James and John O'Shea returned to Callan when they left England. A monumental sculptor named James O'Shea (1815ca-1881) and his son Edward (1853-1910), who specialized in carving Celtic crosses, were active in Callan from the late 1860s until the early 1880s. Edward O'Shea later carried on the business in Kilkenny where he was mayor from 1904 to 1906.

 

References:

      Convamore House, Conva, North Cork https://landedestates.ie/property/3215
      Dictionary of Irish Architects https://www.dia.ie/architects/view/4232/O%27SHEA%2C+JAMES+%26+JOHN+%2A
      "The Architecture of Deane and Woodward", Frederick O'Dwyer, Cork University Press, 1997