“She was beautiful, fearsome, an English aristocrat, a communist spy, a loose woman, a middling novelist, a doting mother, an impossible parent, a successful sculptress, a respected journalist.” This was how Anita Leslie described her first cousin in My Cousin Clare, her wonderful biography of Clare Sheridan.
Clare was born in London in 1885. Her father was Moreton Frewen who was known as ‘mortal ruin’ for his extraordinary capacity to fritter away the family fortune. Her mother was one of the fabulous Jerome sisters who dazzled London’s Edwardian society with their beauty and style. She was educated at home by governesses and later at a convent school in Paris. She was a debutante at 17 but turned away from that social scene. She married William Sheridan, a descendant of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. They had three children, one of whom died. Her husband was killed in World War I.
While mourning her child, she was encouraged to make some kind of memorial so she worked on a model of a weeping angel for her daughter’s grave. She realised she had ability as a sculptor and took up the art form as a career. She was commissioned to sculpt heads of well-known people and held a successful exhibition. As a result she was invited to Russia and against the wishes of her cousin Winston Churchill, she went and stayed for two months. While there she made portraits of a number of eminent Russians including Lenin and Trotsky, and apparently had affairs with some of her sitters. When she returned to London she was shunned and so left for America.
There she had an affair with Charlie Chaplin. She became a successful journalist as European correspondent for The New York World. She managed to interview Michael Collins and was the only journalist to get into the Four Courts to interview Rory O’Connor. Clare was described at this time as ‘beautiful, intelligent, meddlesome and man-mad’. She was a restless soul and made homes for herself in many strange and exotic places.
She was very close to her cousin Anita Leslie and her husband Commander Bill King who lived at Oranmore Castle and it was possibly this connection that attracted her to Galway. She moved here in July 1947 and lived in the house next to the Spanish Arch. She spent a lot of time working in the grounds of Oranmore Castle where she asked the castle mason to rough out big blocks which she would then hack into form. Helen Spellman remembered her bringing a horse and cart along Forster Street with a large lump of stone on it. She brought this into Harry Clare’s stone yard and worked on it there. She shopped in Spellman’s shop and they used to watch her working out their window. A cousin of Clare’s owned Fermoyle Lodge in Conamara and she regularly visited there. She apparently loved fishing.
She lived in Galway for six years and was loved by those who knew her and respected by all. The women of the Claddagh brought her fresh fish from their boats. My mother was a good friend of hers and described her “Floating through the old streets of Galway in violet shaded tweed cloaks of ecclesiastical design”. These cloaks were made by her good friend Cis Ó Máille in her shop in Dominick Street. She made regular visits to the Poor Clares, describing through the grill what Assisi was like. When a building in Augustine Street was being demolished, she rescued the beautifully carved stone Athy Doorway and had it installed on top of the Spanish Arch.
While she was here, she did a lot of carving on wood as well as on stone. She was disappointed at the dearth of commissions from the Church for her carved figures. She had high hopes that the bishop might buy, for his new cathedral, a larger than life-size Madonna and Child she had carved from Sussex oak. She eventually offered this sculpture to a convent but they declined on the basis that the baby Jesus was not wearing trousers and some people might be offended. Her response was “The Renaissance did not consider underwear necessary, why should you”?
In 1952, she sold the house at the Spanish Arch “and so comes to an end another a five year span of which my life is so inadvertently composed….one five year span after another”. We know only of two of her works that remain in Galway, a beautiful crucifix that can be seen in the Church of Christ the King in Salthill, and a carving of “The Madonna of the Quays” which used to be lit up at night on top of the Spanish Arch and which is now in the care of Galway City Museum.
Our photographs today are a vignette of Clare taken in 1917, a photograph of her in a Russian sheepskin hat taken c1920, and an image of “The Madonna of the Quays” which was given to us by Galway City Museum.
