Stone mad

This is a recollection of seven years as an apprentice stonecarver by a craftsman/artist who became a major Irish sculptor. The young Seamus Murphy, studying modelling at the Crawford School of Art in Cork in the early 1920s, took the unusual step of apprenticing himself to a master stonecarver to learn the ancient craft of the mason. First published in 1966 when Murphy was 59 years old, the book tells the story of his seven years' knowledge of the growing challenges and joys of stone - and of the men who worked it. His artistic feeling for quality responded to his workmates' reverence for the "well-made thing", their insistence on the making of the hand before the mind and heart could properly speak.

SEAMUS MURPHY was born in Mallow, Co. Cork, in 1907. On leaving school at fourteen he was apprenticed as a stonecarver. At the same time he attended art school by night. Then a scholarship allowed him study in Paris for two years. On returning to Cork he opened his own studio. He exhibited at the RHA every year from 1931 to his death in 1975, and became Professor of Sculpture at the RHA in 1964. His work, which can be seen all over Ireland, and in England and America, includes allegorical figure, madonnas, headstones, memorials and portrait busts.