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The Shelbourne Hotel owners have reinstalled four statues that were removed due to the mistaken belief that two of them were representations of female slaves.
The workers replaced the statues on their pedestals outside the front of the hotel overnight.
The statues, which have stood at the front of the hotel since 1867, have been restored and several layers of paint and dirt have been removed.
They were removed in July by the hotel’s management, citing the Black Lives Matter movement and its focus on the legacy of slavery.
The hotel management believed that two of the statues represented the slave princesses of Nubia, with Nubia being a rival kingdom of ancient Egypt. The other two statues represent Egyptian princesses.
The move sparked several complaints to the city council that the hotel’s facade, which was restored in 2016, was a protected structure and the removal of the statues was a building permit violation.
The statues were originally designed and sculpted by Mathurin Moreau (1822-1912), the son of another famous French sculptor, Jean-Baptiste-Louis-Joseph Moreau, and were cast in the Val d’Orsne foundry in Paris.
Art historian Kyle Leyden has said that the original catalog from which the four statues were ordered clearly labels them not as slaves but as Egyptian and Nubian women. Leyden said the architect who designed Shelbourne’s facade, John McCurdy, would have ordered the statues from the catalog, which was published in the late 1850s.
Dublin City Council sent a letter of compliance on July 29 giving the hotel management four weeks to respond to claims of an alleged planning breach. Hotel management received another four-week extension to respond to the accusation.
Kennedy Wilson commissioned University College Dublin art historian Professor Paula Murphy to examine the statues. An expert in sculpture, she concluded that they were not representations of slaves and advised on the cleaning operation.
The hotel owners said the restoration took time “due to the delicate conservation work required.”
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