Sculptor. He was born in Dublin, nephew of the sculptor John Lawlor, and trained as a sculptor with Joseph Kirk and at the Dublin Society schools, and then in Paris, subsequently settling in London, where he worked for a time in his uncle’s studio, posing for the figure of a young man in the group representing Engineering for the Albert Memorial, completed in 1871. A difference of opinion resulted in the two men splitting up. Between 1882 and 1885, Michael Lawlor worked as a marble carver in the studio of William Hamo Thornycroft. He showed six works at the Royal Academy between 1879 and 1891, mostly portraits, and was also a regular exhibitor at the Royal Hibernian Academy, in Dublin. In 1886, he showed a sculpture called Night at the Grosvenor Gallery. He worked as an architectural sculptor with Sidney Smith, for whose Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) on Millbank (1893–97) he sculpted a monumental figure of Britannia flanked by a lion and unicorn and for whose Sir Augustus Harris Memorial Drinking Fountain, outside the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Westminster (unveiled 1 November 1897), he carved a relief of two infants personifying Tragedy and Comedy. Lawlor was married to Marianne Agatha Clancy, a militant Irish nationalist. His daughter, Gertrude, was also a sculptor, exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy. In 1922 she showed there a portrait bust of her father.
Bibliography: E. Manning, Marble and Bronze. The Art and Life of Hamo Thornycroft, London, 1982, p. 82; Mapping Sculpture; P. Murphy, Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture: Native Genius Reaffirmed, New Haven and London, 2010, p. 181; P. Murphy (ed.), Art and Architecture of Ireland, vol. III, Sculpture 1600–2000, Dublin, New Haven and London, 2014; T. Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists, 20th Century, Dublin, 1996; W.G. Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, Dublin and London, 1913; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 22–24.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, December 2024
_(2).jpg){kind=link}