Author and sculptor. He was born at Fane Valley, County Louth, Ireland, son of Thomas Fitzgerald, who was MP for Louth at the time of his death in 1834. He went to Stonyhurst College, and studied law at Trinity College Dublin. He later became High Sheriff of County Louth and Crown Prosecutor on the North East Circuit. Much of his life was spent in London, though he later described himself as ‘a denizen of Dublin for 40 years and more’. He was a close friend of Charles Dickens and provided copy for Dickens’s periodical publications. His own publications included a Life of Laurence Sterne (1864) and Chronicle of Bow Street Police- Office (1888). In the 1870s he designed various fittings for the church of Corpus Christi in Maiden Lane, London. Towards the end of the same decade, he published an incisive and important three-part article on the current state of public statuary, entitled ‘The Philosophy of a Statue’ in the Art Journal. His own debut as a sculptor occurred certainly before 1881, since he recounts that he made a portrait of Thomas Carlyle from the life shortly before Carlyle died. A number of sculptural works listed in his book An Output (1912), include a coloured terracotta statuette of Henry Irving as Hamlet, four busts of Dickens, and three bronze statuettes of characters from the plays of Christopher Marlowe, for the pedestal of Edward Onslow Ford’s memorial to Marlowe in Canterbury. The Marlowe statuettes were never placed on the memorial. In 1908 a statue of James Boswell by Fitzgerald was unveiled in Lichfield, and two years later one of Dr Johnson was unveiled outside St Clement Danes church in the Strand, London. In 1914, Fitzgerald offered to make a statue of David Garrick for the Victoria Embankment Gardens, but, after viewing the model, representatives of the LCC turned the offer down.
Bibliography: P. Fitzgerald, ‘The Philosophy of a Statue’, Art Journal: (i) May 1878, pp. 113–14, (ii) January 1879, pp. 5–6, (iii) March 1879, pp. 45–46; P. Murphy (ed), Art and Architecture of Ireland, vol. III, Sculpture 1600–2000, Dublin, New Haven and London, 2014 (entry on P. Fitzgerald by P. Ward-Jackson, pp. 113–14); G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 85–86; T. Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists, 20th Century, Dublin, 1996; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 263–64, 315, 445–46.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011