page_title: Nuns of the Battlefield
section_title: Artist
hierarchical_section_title: Nuns of the Battlefield / Artist
caption_attribution_description: English: Jerome Connor
context_page_description: Nuns of the Battlefield is a public artwork made in 1924 by Irish artist Jerome Connor, located at the intersection of Rhode Island Avenue NW, M Street, and Connecticut Avenue NW, in Washington, D.C., United States. A tribute to the more than 600 nuns who nursed soldiers of both armies during the American Civil War, it is one of two monuments in the District that mark women's roles in the conflict. It is a contributing monument to the Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C., listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1993, it was surveyed for the Smithsonian Institution's Save Outdoor Sculpture! program.
context_section_description: Born in Ireland in 1874, Jerome Connor moved at the age of 14 with his family to Massachusetts. His father was a stonemason, which led to Connor's jobs in New York as a sign painter, stonecutter, bronze founder, and machinist. Inspired by his father's work and his own experience, Connor used to steal his father's chisels as a child and carve figures into rocks.
  In 1899, he moved into the Roycroft Institution where he helped with blacksmithing and eventually began making terracotta busts and reliefs. During four years at Roycroft, he became well known as a sculptor, and was commissioned to create civic works in bronze for placement in Washington, D.C., Syracuse, East Aurora, New York, San Francisco, and Ireland.
  In 1925, he moved back to Ireland and opened his own studio in Dublin, but found few patrons and his work slowed. He died on August 21, 1943, of heart failure. There is a plaque in his honour on Infirmary Road, overlooking Dublin's Phoenix Park, with the words of his friend the poet Patrick Kavanagh:
  He sits in a corner of my memory
  With his short pipe, holding it by the bowl,
  And his sharp eye and his knotty fingers
  And his laughing soul
  Shining through the gaps of his crusty wall.
caption: Jerome Connor
exif: {}