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THE CAPITOL DOME 42 in front. Cass Gilbert was an enthusiastic supporter of the Donnelly firm, oen making use of them in his buildings. e architect noted in a memo dated 12 April 1934, and specifically with regard to their work at the Supreme Court, that "Mr. Donnelly, Jr., and the firm of John Donnelly, Inc., have rendered most excellent services in this modelling throughout." 53 ere can be no doubt that the Donnellys had as much input to work at the Capitol in the early twentieth cen- tury as Crawford had in the nineteenth. And yet the largely disparate nature of their respective input has ensured that where the latter's name is embedded in the history of the building, the Donnelly name is rather overlooked. Such has been the treatment of mason and architectural sculptural work, dating back to an earlier age when their names failed even to be recorded. When Lorado Ta, in his 1924 version of e History of American Sculpture, noted that those "who practise the delicate art of beautifying architecture with sculp- tural adjuncts are almost without exception men from over the sea," he was writing just a little too early to have been in a position to include the Donnellys. By way of conclusion, while it can be identified that there has been considerable input from Irish-Ameri- cans sculptors in different aspects of the decoration of the Capitol, the question remains to be asked, whether the gathering together of this information has any sig- nificance or is simply an indulgent exercise on the part of an Irish art historian who specialises in the study of sculpture. It goes without saying that if all of the works created by these sculptors for the Capitol were removed from the various buildings, the complex would be the lesser for it. But it can also be argued that, in the absence of the aforementioned sculptors, others would have been offered the commissions. What is perhaps more important, therefore, is to recognise the promi- nence of Irish-American sculptors among those carry- ing out work for the buildings—as the Italians had been dominant in the early periods of the construction—and in so doing to acknowledge their place in the profession. omas Somma, writing in 2010, identified nearly 20 sculptors who carried out work for the Library of Congress. 54 e strongest representation among them was American, followed by Irish-American, with the remainder comprised of sculptors of French, British, and German descent. is seems to suggest that those with Irish blood excelled at this particular art form, a suggestion that can be confirmed by comparison with commissions for sculptural work in London in the nineteenth century. It was not for nothing that a writer for the Art Journal would claim, in 1862, that "the best British sculptors are Irishmen." 55 e writer was referring in particular to John Henry Foley 56 (1818–1874) and Patrick MacDowell (1799–1870), who were born in Dublin and Belfast respectively and who, having estab- lished their careers in London, were to receive many of the most prominent sculpture commissions of their day in both England and Ireland. ese two sculptors are therefore known in Ireland, unlike the Irish-Americans discussed in this essay, among whom only Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Andrew O'Connor are represented by work in Ireland. If Irish sculptors made their way to London in the course of the nineteenth century, Irish stonecutters traveled further afield to America, and several among the Irish-American community of sculptors to be found there were their descendants. Seamus Murphy (1907–1975), an Irish stonecutter turned sculptor who remained in Ireland, wrote a book on Irish "stonies" that described their working life in the early twentieth century. 57 Murphy acknowledged that the future held little store for these men as the profession of stonecutter could not be expected to survive long. He would not have been aware of their descendants in the U.S. who had become sculptors. In his book he highlighted an important aspect of the life of a stony that would dis- appear with them—the "companionship and friend- liness." 58 One cannot expect there to have been much in the way of camaraderie among the Irish-American sculptors whose work—well beyond that of the stone- cutter—is to be found in the Capitol. ey were not all living in the same city, nor even in the same peri- od. However, in cases where there are links and con- nections and overlaps—and Saint-Gaudens tends to emerge as the linchpin in this regard, given the extent of his studio and his role within the profession—there is a temptation to move beyond art history into the realm of the creative and to conjure up conversations between them that occasionally made reference to Ireland, con- versations that may even have taken place. PAULA MURPHY is professor emerita in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. Her publications include Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture, Native Genius Reaffirmed (Yale Univer-