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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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The Whiteboys

the-whiteboys

The Whiteboys, a secret Irish agrarian organisation in 18th-century Ireland which uses violent tactics to defend tenant farmer land rights for subsistence farming, is created on October 1, 1761. Their name derives from the white smocks the members wear in their nightly raids. They seek to address rack-rents, tithe collection, excessive priests’ dues, evictions and other oppressive acts. As a result they target landlords and tithe collectors. Over time, Whiteboyism becomes a general term for rural violence connected to secret societies. Because of this generalisation, the historical record for the Whiteboys as a specific organisation is unclear. There are three major outbreaks of Whiteboyism: 1761–64, 1770–76 and 1784–86.

Between 1735 and 1760 there is an increase in land used for grazing and beef cattle, in part because pasture land is exempt from tithes. The landlords, having let their lands far above their value, on condition of allowing the tenants the use of certain commons, now enclose the commons, but do not lessen the rent. As more landlords and farmers switch to raising cattle, labourers and small tenant farmers are forced off the land. The Whiteboys develop as a secret oath-bound society among the peasantry. Whiteboy disturbances had occurred prior to 1761 but were largely restricted to isolated areas and local grievances, so that the response of local authorities had been limited.

Their operations are chiefly in the counties of Waterford, Cork, Limerick, and Tipperary. This combination is not political. It is not directed against the government, but against the local landlords. Members of different religious affiliations take part.

The first major outbreak occurs in County Limerick in November 1761 and quickly spreads to counties Tipperary, Cork, and Waterford. A great deal of organisation and planning seems to have gone into the outbreak, including the holding of regular assemblies. Initial activities are limited to specific grievances and the tactics used non-violent, such as the levelling of ditches that closed off common grazing land, although cattle hamstringing is often practised as the demand for beef prompts large landowners to initiate the process of enclosure. As their numbers increase, the scope of Whiteboy activities begins to widen, and proclamations are clandestinely posted stipulating demands such as that rent not be paid, that land with expired leases not be rented until it has lain fallow for three years, and that no one pay or collect tithes demanded by the Anglican Church. Threatening letters are also sent to debt collectors, landlords, and occupants of land gained from eviction, demanding that they give up their farms.

March 1762 sees a further escalation of Whiteboy activities, with marches in military array preceded by the music of bagpipes or the sounding of horns. At Cappoquin they fire guns and march by the military barracks playing the Jacobite tune “The lad with the white cockade.” These processions are often preceded by notices saying that Queen Sive and her children will make a procession through part of her domain and demand that the townspeople illuminate their houses and provide their horses, ready saddled, for their use. More militant activities often follow such processions with unlit houses in Lismore attacked, prisoners released in an attack on Tallow jail and similar shows of strength in Youghal.

The events of March 1762, however, prompt a more determined response, and a considerable military force under Charles Moore, 1st Marquess of Drogheda is sent to Munster to crush the Whiteboys.

On April 2, 1762 a force of 50 militia men and 40 soldiers set out for Tallow. By mid-April at least 150 suspected Whiteboys have been arrested. Clogheen in County Tipperary bears the initial brunt of this assault as the local parish priest, Fr. Nicholas Sheehy, had earlier spoken out against tithes and collected funds for the defence of parishioners charged with rioting. An unknown number of “insurgents” are reported killed in the “pacification exercise” and Fr. Sheehy is unsuccessfully indicted for sedition several times before eventually being found guilty of a charge of accessory to murder, and hanged, drawn and quartered in Clonmel in March 1766.

In the cities, suspected Whiteboy sympathisers are arrested and in Cork, citizens form an association of about 2,000 strong which offer rewards of £300 for capture of the chief Whiteboy and £50 for the first five sub-chiefs arrested. They often accompany the military on their rampages. The leading Catholics in Cork also offer similar rewards of £200 and £40 respectively.

Acts passed by the Parliament of Ireland (to 1800) and Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (from 1801) to empower the authorities to combat Whiteboyism are commonly called “Whiteboy Acts.”