From the Archive: A pensive moment for the Earl of Wicklow

I f ever there was a photograph which invites a caption competition, this is surely it. Beauty and the bust? Head to head? Gloom and bloom? Or whatever you’re thinking yourself.

These days most of us would find it a challenge to put a name to either of the picture’s subjects. If you identified the bronze as a head by Jacob Epstein, go to the top of the class.

The American-born British sculptor had died the previous year at the height of his fame; and a selection of his portrait sculptures and drawings at the Little Theatre of Brown Thomas on Grafton Street was officially opened by the man in our photograph.

He is named in the caption as “Earl of Wicklow”. If that title isn’t ringing any bells, that may be because the earldom is now extinct, having perished on the death of the ninth earl in 1983.

Our man, however, is the eighth earl: William Cecil James Philip John Paul Howard, better known as Billy Wicklow, star of Dublin literary circles, author of a number of books on theology and a familiar figure in certain drinking establishments around Dublin city centre.

While at Oxford he was known as Cracky Clonmore and was a friend of Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman. He had also been banned from his own home in Wicklow, thanks to his predilection for going to Mass with the help.

It's all very Brideshead Revisited – but this was Ireland, or at least Dublin, in the 1960s.

Our photo has caught His Earlship at a pensive moment. Maybe he’s contemplating the contrast between his own jowly profile and the luminous beauty of the sculpted head, with its mane of glorious curls.