John Francis Kavanagh
In 1951 he took up the post of Senior Lecturer in Sculpture at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, New Zealand.
[4][5] At the age of 16 he had an accident when he fell in a quarry in which he suffered severe spinal injuries which left him needing a surgical boot and walking with the aid of a stick.
"Workers Lifting Steel", a relief of labourers shifting a heavy girder, was described at the time 'as good as anything of the kind by a student that we have ever seen'[8][9][10][11] It was posthumously cast in bronze by the Leicester Galleries in 1994.
[14] Two of the works from this period that were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1933 were Tanith and Wanda Tiburzzi,[16] which also won the bronze medal at the Paris Salon in 1935.
A review of the Royal Academy Exhibition by Kineton Parker in Apollo remarked that "In the Central Hall is a strange, somewhat uncouth knobbly figure of a woman, "Tanith", in bronze, life-size, by John F. Kavanagh, who is a Prix de Rome 1930 Scholar.
[26] The bronze work "Cora Ann: The Spirit of Youth" shows a figure of a Spartan athlete; the model for it was exhibited at the Royal Academy.
[27] Also in 1936 he won an international competition to design the Medal presented by the Royal Institute of British Architects to winners of the Rome Prize in Architecture.
[30] His highly stylized "Lady Jane" was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy (1936) and toured America in 1944.
[33] He was commissioned in 1939 to carve the rood cross for All Souls', Leeds, the "Hook Memorial" Church, receiving £200.
This is a nine foot high limestone statue of Our Lady of Consolation which stood above the entrance to the hospital,[36] so taking foreshortening into consideration.
[21][6] He was commissioned to carve five corner figures, for which he received £440, and 16 low reliefs at £12 each for the Walthamstow Town Hall (1937–1942).
[43] He won the competition in 1941 for a limestone statue of Father Burke, the Dominican preacher, holding a cross, for which he received £750.
[45][46][47] His father had been an altar server for Fr Burke at St Saviour's, Dominick Street, Dublin.
[50] Also after the war he received a commission from the Ford Company of Dagenham for a statue of Spartacus as a monument to Free Europe.
[52][6] In 1950 in a joint submission with the architect Daithi P. Hanly he won the Dublin Custom House Memorial competition, worth £100, with a design of Eire striding towards freedom defended by Fionn Mac Cumhaill's last shot.
In 1951 he took up the position of Senior Lecturer in Sculpture at the Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, New Zealand; he temporarily acted as head in 1960, retiring in 1968.
[6] His bronze head of Sir Douglas Robb (1956), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1957,[57] is on display at the Old Government House and a portrait in oil (1961) is in the University of Auckland.
[61] In 1978 he won the Grand Prix de Lyons with a bronze from the marble head of Georgia Leprohon, a four-year-old child, commissioned by her grandparents.
[21] He had been producing drawings since early in his career but it was only after his retirement that he started painting, many being copies of portraits by old masters.
He was married at Chelsea in 1942 to Jane Ella Cove (b 1892, Wimbledon), who died the following year leaving him a substantial amount in her will.
