John Hogan (1800-58)


Life
b. Tallow, Co Waterford; raised in Cork, and ed. School of Art at Cork; worked in solicitor’s office; wood-carver with Woodward & Deane; worked for Dr Murphy, Bishop of Cork, carving 27 statues in wood and bas-relief for North Chapel; went to Rome with support of subscription and patronage of Lord de Tabley, working and residing there, 1824-49; converted to neo-classicism; revisited Ireland, 1829, 1840, &c.; refused Royal Hibernian Academy offer of membership; elected to Vir Tuosi del Pantheon, 1837; placed ‘Repeal cap’ on O’Connell’s head at Mullaghmast, Co. Clare, 1843;
 
returned to live in Ireland 1848 [var. 1849], as a result of the Italy revolution but disappointed by reception in post-Famine conditions; Irish works incl. ‘The Dead Christ’ (Carmelite Church, in Clarendon St. Dublin, 1828); Theobald Mathew (1840, 1844); James Warren Doyle (Carlow Cath., 1840); Daniel O’Connell (City Hall, Dublin, 1846, and the Crescent, Limerick, 1857); Thomas Drummond (City Hall, with motto, ‘Property has its duties as well as its rights’); Thomas Davis (Mount St Jerome, 1853), Robert Graves (Royal College of Physicians, Dublin, 1853); a ‘Drunken Faun’ (UCD); also ‘Eve’, in Rome;
 

d. 27 March, 14 Wentworth Place, Dublin; his widow and children assisted by subscription raised by William Carleton, who wrote a tribute in the Irish Quarterly Review; his Italian wife was figured on the watermark of the Irish currency, 1922-77. ODNB BREF DIB DIH

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Criticism
John Turpin, John Hogan, Irish Neo-Classical Sculptor in Rome (1982), 216pp., port. by Mulrenan; bibliographical study included in Sarah Atkinson, Essays (Dublin 1895).

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References
W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; this ed. 1984); John Hogan, b. Cork, 1800; studied plaster casts of antique statuary recently presented to the Cork Arts Society; early classical work includes a drunken faun (praised by Thorwaldsen), a Roman soldier, and a Minerva (1822). Studied at Rome after 1823, visiting Vatican and Capitoline museums; became first Irish or English member of Virtuosi del Pantheon in 1837; his Drunken Faun only survives in plaster casts in Dublin and Cork; his Shepherd Boy in Iveagh House; portrait statue of Bishop James Doyle (JKL) in Carlow Cathedral combines classicism and naturalism. (p.122.)

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Notes
Crowning moment: Hogan placed the ‘famous Repeal cap’ on Daniel O’Connell’s head at the Mullaghmast monster meeting in Co. Clare, 1843; see Fergus O’Ferrall, ‘Daniel O’Connell, Changing Images’, Kennedy & R. Gillespie, eds., Ireland: Art into History (1994), p.99.

Portrait: There is an oil portrait of Hogan by Charles Grey; see Anne Crookshank, Irish Portraits (Ulster Museum 1965). See also port. by [?Wm.] Mulrennan, in Turpin’s biography, as supra.

Dan O’Connell: Hogan’s statue of Daniel O’Connell in a toga stands in the Rotunda of the City Hall, Dublin, along with others by him of Charles Lucas, Wm. Drummond, Henry Grattan and Thomas Davis. [See History of the Rotunda - online.]

Sunny Jim?: Peter Costello writes in James Joyce: The Years of Growth, 1882-1915, London: Kyle Cathie 1992)): ‘Peter McSwiney was the founder of the story that is now Clerys, and had issue including a son Paul Peter who died before him, who married a daughter of James Hogan [sic], the Cork-born sculptor [sic]. his sister [...] was married to the painter Michael Angelo Hayes.’ (q.p.)

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