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The owners of the Shelbourne Hotel will reinstall four statues that were removed due to the mistaken belief that two of them were representations of female slaves.
The Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin is owned by the American multinational real estate company Kennedy Wilson and operated by the Marriott Group. Kennedy Wilson has told Dublin City Council that he intends to return the four statues to their plinths outside the front of the hotel where they have stood since 1867.
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 slave princesses from 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.
Former Attorney General and Justice Minister Michael McDowell was one of those who filed a complaint with the council.
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.
A page from the original catalog from which the Shelbourne Hotel commissioned the four statues.
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 Professor Paula Murphy, an art historian at University College Dublin, to examine the statues. An expert in sculpture, she has concluded that they are not representations of slaves.
The statues will be restored to their plinths once they are cleaned as there are layers of paint that need to be removed. Your restoration will include a plaque that explains your background.
No date has been set for their reinstatement, but it is likely to occur in the next few weeks.
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