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Birth of Sarah Atkinson, Writer & Philanthropist

Sarah (née Gaynor) Atkinson, Irish writer, biographer, essayist and philanthropist, is born in Athlone, County Westmeath, on October 23, 1823.

She is the eldest daughter of John and Anne Gaynor, of Athlone. At the age of fifteen she moves with her family to Dublin where her education is completed. Two of her sisters, Anna and Marcella, become nuns with Religious Sisters of Charity. At twenty-five, she marries the much older George Atkinson, a medical doctor and, with Sir John Gray, joint proprietor of the Freeman’s Journal. They are both interested in art and she accompanies her husband on many trips abroad, taking in the cultural centres of Europe. At home they make the acquaintance of prominent politicians, journalists and musicians. Regular guests at their house are Dr. John Shaw, editor of the Evening Mail, Rosa Mulholland and Katharine Tynan.

The loss of her only child in his fourth year deeply affected Atkinson and she throws herself into charitable and other good works. She moves with her husband to Drumcondra in Dublin, where she makes the acquaintance of Ellen Woodlock. Woodlock, a sister of Francis Sylvester Mahony, is born in Cork, County Cork, in 1811 and is married in 1830 and widowed quite young, just before the birth of her only son. Woodlock is the sister-in-law of Rev. Dr. Bartholomew Woodlock, who is President of All Hallows College. She intends to join a religious community in France but after spending a few years in that country (with her son in a nearby school) returns to Cork and then moves to Dublin. At this time the post-famine city is inundated with poverty-stricken families and abandoned children. Fever and disease are rife, and the Poor Law of the day is insufficient to meet the needs of the starving population. Many evictions are taking place in deplorable circumstances, which force the poor, however reluctantly, to seek refuge in the workhouses. The most vulnerable sections of the community are single women (including widows) and children. Woodlock is totally against placing children in workhouses and founds St. Joseph’s Industrial Institute in 1855 to rescue girls from that situation. With her, Atkinson interests herself in the female paupers of the South Dublin Union. With much difficulty in the 1860s, she gains permission for ladies like herself to enter and inspect the condition of young girls in the North and South Dublin Unions, after which she opens a better home to which many were transferred. She campaigns for years to improve the state of the workhouses and provide better conditions for the poverty-stricken. One of her sisters runs the Our Lady’s Hospice in Dublin, to which she donates funds. She helps Woodlock establish the Children’s Health Ireland at 9 Buckingham Street in 1872, which later moves to Temple Street, which she visits every day. Every week she visits hospitals and prisons, in the 1880s accompanying Katharine Tynan to visit the last of the Land Leaguers incarcerated in Kilmainham Gaol.

From the 1850s Atkinson contributes a large number of historical and biographical articles and essays to several publications, including Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine, The Month, The Nation and the Freeman’s Journal. She later writes for the Irish Monthly after it is established, and for the Irish Quarterly Review. Her Life of Mary Aikenhead is published in 1875 and is very well received. She follows this with biographies of the Irish sculptors John Henry Foley and John Hogan and also a life of Catherine of Siena. A collection of her essays, with a preface and biography by Rosa Mulholland, is published posthumously in 1895.

Atkinson dies in County Dublin on July 8, 1893, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, where the cemetery committee places a Celtic cross as a monument to her and her husband after his death on December 8, 1893.


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Death of Sir Thomas Farrell, Irish Sculptor

Sir Thomas Farrell, Irish sculptor, dies at his home, Redesdale House, Stillorgan, County Dublin, on July 2, 1900.

Farrell is born in 1827 in Mecklenburgh Street (later called Railway Street) in Summerhill, Dublin, one of six sons of Terence Farrell, sculptor, and Maria Farrell (née Ruxton). He trains as a sculptor in his father’s workshops. In 1842 he enters the modelling school of the Royal Dublin Society, where he is awarded the prize for “Original design in clay” the following year. He is awarded premiums by the Royal Irish Art Union in 1844 and 1846. As a student he becomes acquainted with the neoclassical sculpture of John Flaxman and John Hogan. His first commission is a monument to Archbishop Daniel Murray in St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin.

One of the first works that make Farrell prominent is the bas-relief representing the last charge at Waterloo, designed for the Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park. His work is accepted after public competition. Another of his early works is his memorial to Captain John McNeil Boyd in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. He enters the competition for the monument to Daniel O’Connell in 1864, but the commission is awarded to John Henry Foley.

His statue of William Smith O’Brien, the Young Ireland leader, formerly at the head of D’Olier Street, is now in O’Connell Street, as is another statue by him, that of Sir John Gray, the surgeon and politician who is instrumental in giving Dublin its water supply.

Throughout his career, Farrell remains actively involved in the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA). He is elected directly as a full member in 1860 rather than undergoing an initial phase of associate membership. He exhibits almost annually with the academy until his death. He holds a number of posts, including professor of sculpture and treasurer, before being elected president in 1893, being the first sculptor to be so honoured. His achievements are recognised with a knighthood in May 1894.

Farrell dies at his residence, Redesdale House, in Stillorgan, County Dublin, on July 2, 1900. He is a shy, retiring man, and his death is not announced to the public for three days, in keeping with his wishes to avoid any sort of elaborate display on his behalf. Intensely private, he never marries and lives a life immersed in his work. Contemporary accounts describe him as constantly dissatisfied with his work despite consistent public approval for it.


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Birth of John Hogan, the “Greatest of Irish Sculptors”

Irish sculptor John Hogan, described in some sources as the “greatest of Irish sculptors,” is born in Tallow, County Waterford, on October 14, 1800. According to the Dictionary of Irish Biography he is responsible for “much of the most significant religious sculpture in Ireland” during the 19th century. Working primarily from Rome, among his best-known works are three versions of The Dead Christ, commissioned for churches in Dublin, Cork, and the Basilica of St. John the Baptist in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada.

Hogan is the third child of John Hogan, a carpenter and builder of Cove Street, Cork, County Cork, and Frances Cos, the great-granddaughter of Sir Richard Cox, Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1703 to 1707. As the family feels that she had married beneath her station, she is disinherited.

At the age of fourteen, Hogan is placed as clerk to an attorney, where he spends much of his time carving figures in wood. After two years, he chooses to be apprenticed to the architect Sir Thomas Deane, where his talents for drawing and carving are developed. He carves balusters, capitals, and ornamental figures for Deane’s buildings. At the completion of his apprenticeship in March 1820, Deane encourages him to consider taking up sculpture as a profession. For the next three years, he attends lectures on anatomy, copies casts of classic statuary in the Gallery of the Cork Society of Arts, and makes anatomical studies in wood of feet, hands, and legs. Among the first of his works to attract notice is a life-size figure of Minerva for an insurance building built by Deane.

In 1821, Hogan carves twenty-seven statues in wood for the North Chapel in Cork for the reredos behind the high altar. After subsequent cathedral renovations, these are now positioned in decorative plasterwork over the nave. He also does a bas-relief of the “Last Supper” for the altar. This work keeps him employed for about a year.

In 1823, the engraver William Paulet Carey visits Cork, and impressed with Hogan’s talent, begins to publicise his work in order to raise subscriptions for him to study in Italy. Hogan arrives in Rome, by way of Dublin and Liverpool, in 1824. He works in the galleries of the Vatican but cannot afford a studio. Additional subscriptions allow him to improve his situation, rent a studio, purchase marble, and hire models. Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen says to him, “My son, you are the best sculptor I leave after me in Rome.”

In 1829, Hogan visits Ireland, bringing several works with him. The Royal Arts Society provides a venue for an exhibition. The Royal Dublin Society awards him a gold medal.

Hogan’s best-known work and masterpiece are the three versions of the statue of The Dead Christ or The Redeemer in Death. Created in flawless Carrara marble, the first version (1829) is located in St. Therese’s Church, Dublin, the second (1833) in St. Finbarr’s (South) Church, Cork, and the third and final version (1854) is located in the Basilica of St. John the Baptist, Newfoundland. His other works include the Sleeping Shepherd and The Drunken Faun. He assures his international reputation in 1829 with The Dead Christ. Thereafter, his creations are snapped up by Irish bishops visiting his Rome studio.

In 1837 Hogan is elected a member of the Virtuosi del Pantheon. During the next several years, he has several works in hand, including a marble statue of Daniel O Connell, for the Repeal Association. The statue stands today at City Hall, Dublin, the same spot where O’Connell gave his first speech against the Acts of Union in 1800.

In 1840, a monumental group in memory of Bishop James Warren Doyle, founder of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Carlow, is brought to Dublin and exhibited at the Royal Exchange. The statue of Bishop Doyle is in the Cathedral of the Assumption, as is a second Hogan work depicting the Holy Family.

Hogan marries Cornelia Bevignani in Rome in 1838. The figure of Hibernia, in Hogan’s work Hibernia with the Bust of Lord Cloncurry (1844), is reportedly modelled on his wife. A representation of this work is later used as the watermark on all Series A banknotes printed in Ireland from the 1920s to the 1970s. The couple has four sons and eight daughters.

With the revolutionary movement growing in Italy during the 1840s, and after spending twenty-four years in Rome, Hogan returns with his family to Ireland in 1848. At first, he finds little work in the aftermath of the Great Famine, but gradually commissions increase. He can be impatient with ignorance, intolerant of professional inferiority, and independent. He holds aloof from other artists and refuses to join the Royal Hibernian Academy.

Hogan has a stroke in 1855 and, though he recovers somewhat, his health begins to fail. By the year prior to his death, he can no longer work and his sons, John Valentine Hogan and James Cahill, assist at his studio and complete some of the work.

Hogan dies at his home at 14 Wentworth Place (later renamed Hogan Place), Dublin, on March 27, 1858. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

(Pictured: Scan of a drawing depicting the Irish sculptor John Hogan with his sculpture The Drunken Faun in background, published in the Dublin University Magazine, January 1850)


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Death of James Warren Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin

James Warren Doyle, Roman Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, who uses the signature “JKL”, an acronym from “James Kildare and Leighlin,” dies on June 15, 1834. He is active in the Anti-Tithe movement and a campaigner for Catholic emancipation until it is attained in 1829. He is also an educator, church organiser and the builder of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Carlow.

Doyle is born close to New Ross, County Wexford in 1786, the posthumous son of a respectable Catholic farmer. His mother, Anne Warren, of Quaker extraction, is living in poverty at the time of his birth. At the age of eleven he witnesses the horrors of the Battle of New Ross between the United Irishmen and British Crown forces supplemented by the militia and yeomanry.

Doyle receives his early education at Clonleigh, at Rathconrogue at the school of a Mr. Grace, and later at the Augustinian College, New Ross under the care of an Augustinian monk, Rev. John Crane.

Doyle joins the Augustinian friars in 1805 at Grantstown, County Wexford, and then studies for his doctorate at Coimbra in Portugal (1806–08). His studies are disturbed by the Peninsular War, during which he serves as a sentry in Coimbra. Later, he accompanies the British Army with Arthur Wellesley‘s forces to Lisbon as an interpreter.

Following Doyle’s return to Ireland, he is ordained to the priesthood on October 1, 1809, at Enniscorthy. He teaches logic at the Augustinian College, New Ross. In 1813, he is appointed to a professorship at St. Patrick’s, Carlow College, holding the Chair of Rhetoric and in 1814, the Professorship of Theology.

Michael Corcoran, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, dies on February 22, 1819. Doyle is a popular choice of the clergy and bishops of the Archdiocese of Dublin and is chosen by the Holy See as Corcoran’s successor. He is formally named in August 1819 and is duly consecrated in Carlow Parish Church on November 14. During his fifteen-year tenure as Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, he earns respect nationwide for his polemics in furtherance of the Catholic position in both Irish and British society, and in supporting the work of the Catholic Association. His books on pastoral, political, educational and inter-denominational matters provide a rich source of material for social and religious historians. He is a close ally of Daniel O’Connell in the political campaign for Catholic emancipation which is finally passed in 1829 by the Wellington government.

In 1830, the new tithe-proctor of Graigue, a parish of 4,779 Catholics and 63 Protestants, decides to break with the tradition of Doyle’s predecessor and to enforce seizure orders for the collection of arrears of Tithes. Tithes provide financial support of the established Anglican Church of Ireland. Some of the recalcitrant Catholics habitually transfer ownership of their livestock to Doyle in order to avoid seizure at the town fair. The new proctor requests their priest’s cooperation in handing over the assets. Doyle refuses, and the proctor, aided by the Royal Irish Constabulary, seize some of the livestock. A mass riot breaks out at the fair and there is several casualties. A civil disobedience campaign follows, peppered with sporadic violence mostly at county fairs over the seizure of livestock. A period of instability that becomes known as the Tithe War follows.

Doyle is a leader of nonviolent resistance to the Tithe, devoting himself both to strengthening the nonviolent resistance and to discouraging like paramilitary secret societies who have taken to using violence to drive out tithe-collectors and to intimidate collaborators. He says, “I maintain the right which [Irish Catholics] have of withholding, in a manner consistent with the law and their duty as subjects, the payment of tithe in kind or in money until it is extorted from them by the operation of the law.”

Given Doyle’s prior experience in education, his major contribution is arguably in helping the establishment of National Schools across Ireland from 1831, the initiative of Edward Smith-Stanley, Chief Secretary for Ireland, which are initially started with a UK government grant of £30,000. The proposed system is ahead of state provision for education in England or Scotland at that time. This Model School prototype is, in some respects, experimental. His involvement is a sign of his practicality and foresight.

Doyle makes statements on other issues: the theological status of ‘non-Catholic’ Christians, freedom to convert to Protestantism, mixed marriages and, as already mentioned, on the union of Catholics and Anglicans. On this last issue he is asked to resign by Rome and is eventually allowed to continue after agreeing not to speak on the issue again.

The construction of Carlow Cathedral of the Assumption crowns Doyle’s career, being started in 1828 and finished at the end of November 1833. He falls ill for a number of months before dying on June 15, 1834. He is buried in his new cathedral. A sculpture, by John Hogan, in memorial to Doyle is finished in 1839.

Several biographies are written on Doyle before 1900 and his influence on the later Irish Catholic bishops in the period 1834-1900 is considerable. He had proved that negotiations with government could be beneficial to his church, his congregation, and its finances.