Sculptor and painter born in the city of Cork, Republic of Ireland, where, from 1943 to 1946, he studied at Crawford College of Art and Design. He afterwards joined the Royal Air Force as an engineer, subsequently continuing in this occupation with civil airlines. By 1954, the year of his marriage to Anthea Williams, he was living in Ipswich in Suffolk. Although he became a member of the Ipswich Art Club, he retained links with his hometown through his membership of Cork’s National Sculpture Factory. In September 1990 his bronze group, Our Lady of Grace (‘The Ipswich Madonna’), and accompanying bronze inscription panel, were installed on a wall in Lady Lane, Ipswich, on the site of St Mary’s Chapel (also known as the shrine of Our Lady of Grace). The chapel, closed in 1538 as part of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, had contained an oak statue of the Madonna and Child which had been taken to London for burning but which, it is believed, was rescued and taken to Nettuno, just south of Rome, where it was installed in a local church. Mellamphy’s group is a copy of the much-restored Madonna at Nettuno, as commissioned by the Meryemana Foundation (established in 1977 as the Guild of Our Lady of Ipswich with the primary aim of re-establishing the Ipswich shrine and in 2022 renamed the Guild of Our Lady of Grace). Mellamphy was also commissioned to make a replica in wood which, with the eventual establishment of the shrine in Ipswich’s Church of St Mary at the Elms, was unveiled and dedicated in September 2002. He died at Woodbridge Lodge Residential Home, Suffolk, on 5 July 2016.
Bibliography: J. Bentley and N. Pevsner, Suffolk: East (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, (2015), 2018, pp. 310, 358; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. 172–73; RCDEA Archives: ‘Mellamphy, Robert Nicholas (1927-2016)’; St Mary at the Elms, Ipswich: ‘The Shrine. Our Lady of Grace of Ipswich’; Shrine of Our Lady of Grace, Ipswich; Suffolk Artists: ‘Mellamphy, Robert Nicholas’.
Terry Cavanagh, July 2025