Oisín Kelly
Irish sculptor (1915–1981)
Oisín Kelly (17 May 1915 – 12 October 1981) was an Irish sculptor.
Life and career
Oisín Kelly was born as Austin Kelly in Dublin, the son of William (Willy) Kelly, principal of the James's Street National School, and his wife, Elizabeth (née McLean). He studied languages at Trinity College, Dublin. Until he became an artist in residence at the Kilkenny Design Centre in 1966, he worked as a teacher of Art, English, Irish and French from 1943 to 1964 at St Columba's College, Dublin. He initially attended night class at the National College of Art and Design and studied briefly (1948–1949) at Chelsea Polytechnic in London under Henry Moore.
He originally concentrated on small wood carvings and his early commissions were mostly for Roman Catholic churches. He became well known after he was commissioned to do a sculpture, The Children of Lir (1964), for Dublin's Garden of Remembrance, opened in 1966 on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. More outdoor/public commissions followed, including the statue of James Larkin on Dublin's O'Connell Street. and the 1966 carved Last Supper on the front of St. Theresa's church in Sion Mills, County Tyrone.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2016945. VIAF identifies the subject as 6219720. The Library of Congress control number is n79132803. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1981, 1966 and 1943.
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This entry incorporates text from “Oisín Kelly” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.