John Cassidy, the creator of the bronze memorial to the Bristol slave trader, produced radical and evocative work, writes Simon Casimir Wilson
It is perhaps a little ironic that a professor of public history at the University of Manchester should dismiss, and in the Guardian moreover, the sculptor John Cassidy’s now notorious statue of Edward Colston as a “mediocre piece of late-Victorian public art” (‘A potent historical artefact’: the statue of Edward Colston’s new role, 4 June).
Cassidy (1860-1939) was a Mancunian sculptor, whose Victoria jubilee fountain adorns Albert Square and whose masterpiece, the allegorical group Adrift, is a prominent feature of St Peter’s Square. It represents, he wrote, “the dependence of human beings upon one another, the response of human sympathy to human needs”.
