Pierce Francis Connelly was born on March 29, 1841 at Grand Coteau, Louisiana, United States. He was the son of Pierce Connelly and Cornelia Peacock; the latter, as “Mother Cornelia Connelly”, later became the foundress of the Order of the Holy Child Jesus.
A few months prior to Frank’s birth his father, formerly an Episcopal clergyman, had announced his desire to enter the Catholic priesthood. The little boy lived with his mother in a convent; then with his father in Italy where the Prince Borghese became interested in him, and at five he was placed in a school for boys at Hampstead, England. In 1850 his father renounced the Catholic faith and reentered the Protestant Episcopal ministry, taking his three children to Italy with him and settling in Florence, where for some years he was rector of the American Protestant Episcopal Church.
Frank’s artistic talent manifested itself early and he was sent to Paris to study painting; there he was a medalist of the École des Beaux- Arts. He later went to Rome to continue his studies.
Connelly worked in Florence for a number of years and then he settled for a while in England where he seems to have enjoyed somewhat of a vogue, for he did numerous portraits of members of the aristocracy. To the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1871 he sent busts of Henry George, Earl Percy, and Algernon George, sixth duke of Northumberland. Besides these he did a full-length statue of the Duchess of Northumberland; a bust of Princess Louise; and a bust of the Marchioness of Lome, a replica of which is preserved in the Inner Temple in London. Busts of the Duke of Northumberland and Lady Percy are said to be in Alnwick Castle.
During the Centennial year, 1876, Connelly came to America and was largely represented at the exposition in Philadelphia. Among his works of this period were “Honor Arresting the Triumph of Death", “St. Martin and the Beggar, ” “Thetis” (1874, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York), “Queen Philippa, ” “Lady Clare, ” “Diana Transforming Actæon, ” “Viola, ” and “The Thread of Life. ” He made busts of the Countess Von Rosen, Mr. Lippincott, and Mr. McKean. Most of his works are done in marble with high finish and often with minute detail. The very subject of the majority of them illustrates his romantic tendency.
After a few months in America Connelly went to New Zealand where he reverted to painting again, and made many sketches of the craters, lakes, and glaciers of the country. An exhibition of his paintings was held in Auckland in 1877. He likewise took up mountain climbing and explored some hitherto almost unknown mountains. In the early eighties he returned once more to Florence where his father died in 1883. Little of the sculptor’s later career is recorded; he was in Florence in January 1900, at the deathbed of his sister Adeline who had turned Catholic again, after their mother’s death, and died praying for her brother’s conversion.
Connelly was greeted as one of the most significant of American sculptors. The most important of his works was a bronze group, “Honor Arresting the Triumph of Death, ” a reference to the fallen soldiers of the Civil War, which he had worked on from 1866 to 1869 and which had been exhibited in his studio in Florence the year of its completion. It is now in the Pennsylvania Academy.
