Spirit of Peace statue

**Spirit of Peace statue
**By The Auckland Psychogeographer

Some icons trumpet their significance loudly, others have a muted, lingering resonance. The Spirit of Peace statue by Pierce Francis Connelly occupies a mournful place in the mental map of Aucklanders, known best as the cover image by renowned photographer and artist John Reynolds for the explosive Metro magazine expose “An ‘Unfortunate Experiment’ at National Women’s” by Sandra Coney and Phillida Bunkle. Their article is available online here, and the ensuing Cartwright enquiry and related coverage, here. Reynolds says the blood-red colour tint of the statue was hard to achieve in low light, but successfully intensified the symbolism.

The marble statue is in a small garden in the centre of the drop-off parking for the ageing Building 15 of the Cornwall Complex, part of what is today known as the Greenlane Clinical Centre, formerly known as National Women’s Hospital. It’s an unassuming spot for the ghostly lady, a work so classical as to be ubiquitous, yet somehow eerie, as if she might spring to vengeful life around midnight.

The Spirit of Peace was originally sited in an Italian villa, before “Father of Auckland” and patron of Pierce Francis Connelly, John Logan Campbell shipped it to Cornwall Park, his faintly mediterranean gift to Auckland. It was moved by trustees of the park in the early 1960’s to its present site.

Other marble Connelly works live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institute - he was an American from Louisiana, was raised in Europe - and he exhibited at the Royal Academy, and completed commissions for Queen Victoria. Catholic protocols saw his family split apart when his father became a priest, his mother eventually becoming a nun. He travelled extensively, including to New Zealand, but died and was buried - in a Protestant cemetery in Italy, a final rebuke to the Catholicism that divided his family.

Image Credits: The Auckland Psychogeographer