The US celebrations took the form of a symposium accompanied by the premiere of a documentary on the sculptor held at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover. The Hood is the campus gallery of Dartmouth College and now under the directorship of Dr Brian Kennedy, formerly assistant director of the National Gallery of Ireland and more recently director of the National Gallery of Australia.

It is utterly appropriate that the college should be the location of such an event: the Rauner Library on the campus houses Saint-Gaudens's papers, and his former home and studio, now a historic site, is less than 20 miles south of the university in Cornish.

But the question that arises is whether or not we, in Ireland, should have organised a similar event.

Not only was the sculptor's final work the Parnell statue for Dublin but Saint-Gaudens was born in Ireland and was described in an American newspaper, following his death, as "the most famous sculptor to spring from Irish soil". Saint-Gaudens was born in Dublin on 1 March 1848 to a French cobbler and an Irish mother, Mary McGuinness.

They lived briefly on Charlemont Street before emigrating to the US, their son just six months old.

Saint-Gaudens was then brought up in New York and, though he remained very much a New Yorker, Boston society would also claim him as he became involved in cultural developments there.

Taking a circuitous route into sculpture by way of cameo making, Saint-Gaudens was to become one of the major American sculptors of the 1800s, receiving prestigious public commissions and producing heroic monumental sculptures. Statuary by Saint-Gaudens graces several major cities on the east coast of America. Notable civil-war memorials are the Farragut and Sherman statues in New York and the colossal Shaw relief in Boston, with Lincoln and Logan represented by statues in Chicago.

The Parnell statue was an important commission for Saint-Gaudens, who wished to make it the crowning work of his life. He could not have known, when he accepted the commission, that he would be dead before the monument was erected in Dublin.

Diagnosed with cancer in 1900, he died seven years later aged 59. Saint-Gaudens was an interesting choice for the Parnell monument as he had never played the Irish card in the course of his career and had never visited Ireland, although he spent a considerable amount of time in Europe, particularly in London, Paris and Rome.

He made a pilgrimage to his father's hometown in the Pyrenees in 1899 but never considered visiting that of his mother or his birthplace until the Parnell commission was offered to him. While he would have liked to see the location for the monument in Dublin, other commitments and eventually his illness intervened. He also talked about crossing the Atlantic for its erection but that was not to be.

However, he completed the work before his death, in spite of a fire in his studio in 1904 which destroyed the finished plaster model of Parnell along with much of Saint-Gaudens' other work, sketches and models. The Parnell was cast in New York in the winter of 1906 and dispatched to Ireland in June 1907. As negotiations for its architectural setting had not been completed by then, the bronze statue of Parnell was included in the Oireachtas Exhibition of Arts and Crafts, held at the Royal Hibernian Academy in August 1907, affording people the opportunity of seeing the completed sculpture about which there had been so much publicity.

The Freeman's Journal reported ecstatically and at considerable length on the statue, recognizing it was different to the statuary already in place in the city and deeming it an extraordinary likeness of Parnell. After the exhibition opened to the public on 2 August, there was no doubt the Parnell statue was the central attraction. Augustus Saint-Gaudens died the following day.

Paula Murphy (senior lecturer at UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy)