Some Statues by John Hogan
A Machine-Readable Version
Thomas MacGreevy
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There is no Irish artist of the past whose work calls more insistently for revaluation than the sculptor, John Hogan. Born of humble parents in County Waterford in the year 1800, he died famous as long ago as 1857. Yet no exhaustive study of his work has ever been published and there is very little active interest in him. Considering what a great man he was, this apathy makes one feel inclined to surrender to the old and only too often wretchedly justified belief that for any artist to set out to be a specifically Irish artist is to set out on the road of lonely battles against indifference on the part of those who can afford to be interested, and lack of means to provide the necessary backing on the part of those who are enthusiastic. It is undeniable that during the nineteenth century, and the early twentieth century too, the ruling class in Ireland, the class that could afford to pay, tended — it was natural enough — to interest itself in Irish artists only if they could make good in London. And — as was natural too — an Irish artist could only make good in London to the extent that he ceased to be Irish. Hogan, with the lack of worldly wisdom that is one of the characteristics of the great artist, simply gave London the go-by. Why, indeed, except for commercial reasons, should he not? Since the Reformation there had been no English sculpture of outstanding importance. Also, of course, most pre-Reformation sculpture in England had been destroyed — though, a hundred and twenty years ago, when Hogan was a young man, that mattered less, for mediæval sculpture hardly counted. In those days few people realised that the portals of Notre Dame de Chartres, for instance, included a fair proportion of the greatest sculpture the world has ever seen; fewer still that what remained of early Christian and mediæval Irish sculpture was worthy of serious study. That was because the classicism of the Renaissance held sway. Hogan's instinct, however, was more than merely fashionably classical. He was a born classicist and Italy was obviously the place for him to study. To Italy, therefore, he was sent by his admirers in Cork — where his gifts were discovered — and Dublin. And, for more than twenty years, in Italy he stayed, taking only a very occasional holiday at home and returning for good only in 1848.
There, then, as Henry James might say, he precariously was — a young Irishman in Rome, a young Irishman of lowly origins and, in the matter of this world's goods, very poor indeed, but rich in genius and determined to use his gifts for the glory of his own country, while acknowledging that it was Rome's treasures from Greek and Graeco-Roman antiquity and from the Renaissance, which helped him to develop those gifts. He had a few supporters, Irishmen and Italians, the great Scandinavian sculptor, Thorwaldsen, even an Englishman or two — but when it is a question of such an expensive and communal art as sculpture, a few supporters are not enough. Organised society, a governing class, has to be interested if a sculptor is to live and produce more than a fraction of what he has it in him to produce and wants to produce.
If the Irish governing class of the day remained flatly
indifferent to the sculptor of genius who had sprung from the Irish people,
there were unofficial bodies more representative of the people, and with a
surer artistic instinct, who were interested — the Repeal
Association, for instance, and the Young
Irelanders. The former commissioned
Hogan to execute the colossal
statue of
O'Connell
which now stands in the
Dublin City Hall. This statue could not, I
think, legitimately be described as beautiful in the traditional sense. But it
must be the noblest statement about
O'Connell that has ever
achieved valid utterance. It is probably the greatest piece of sculpture
executed by an Irishman since the High Cross at
Monasterboice, and in its own
genre one of the greatest sculptured
portraits executed in any European country during the last two hundred years. I
should rank it considerably higher than, for instance,
Canova's nude,
over-idealised, relatively characterless, Buonaparte in
Milan, or even than
Rude's vivid Marshall Ney opposite the Observatory in
Paris. First of all, it shows an almost
impeccable mastery of form, in the sense that it is unified in conception and
that the sculptor has been able to give animation to the whole structure of the
figure. It is alive throughout. Every square inch of the surface has the
appropriate kind and degree of movement and stillness necessary to create the
illusion of life. There are very few artists whose human figures awaken in the
beholder the sense of the wonder of the living form. Yet it is a thing that can
arouse a feeling of almost religious awe. "I am fearfully and wonderfully
made," says the psalmist. In all his figures
Hogan had that sense of the
miracle of creation that is the human form, but in the
O'Connell
it was put to its greatest test. For at the time that he
began to work on the statue, about 1844,
O'Connell was long past the
prime of manhood . He was, in fact, nearly seventy and had only a few years to
live. There was no longer anything of the Greek athlete about him — if
ever there had been. Always a big man, he had grown rather fleshy. But
Hogan, being a great and highly
sensitive artist, was able to give refined statement to the unrefined fact of
O'Connell's prodigious
physique. Thus, without denying that here and there
O'Connell tended unduly to
bulge, he designed the classical folds of the mantle to carry one over to the
dignity, one might indeed say to the majesty, of the figure as a whole, to the
heroic proportions and movement, the splendid shoulders, the magnificently
poised head. Again, there is no denial of the unclassical pugnaciousness of the
O'Connell chin, but how
Hogan balances it by insisting on
the fine lines about the mouth, suggestive of mobility, of eloquence, of charm,
of humour. Here is where one realises that all the stories of
O'Connell's genius as an
orator must be absolutely true. And then, even if the eyes were small, as
Hogan complained they were small,
(just as he complained about the amount of what he called "morbid flesh" round
the chin), the lines about them are made to suggest a potential variety of
expression, indicative of great range and depth of understanding, the quality
that justified our people in entrusting their political destinies to its
possessor at a particular time and for a particular purpose.
Hogan told
Davis that he wished this
statue to express "all the power and grandeur of concentrated Ireland". A
figure, he said "no more of weeping and weakness but of pride and command". He
succeeded nobly in putting all this into the statue, and it is not an
exaggeration to claim that few, if any, of the Roman emperors had their
biographies written in marble with at once such frankness and such exhaltation
of spirit as
Hogan showed in writing
O'Connell's biography
here.
From
O'Connell to
Drummond!
Drummond was the young
Scotsman who brought a conscience to the post of Under-Secretary of State for
Ireland, which he held from 1835 to 1840; the
man who, when the
Tipperary magistrates pressed him to adopt
extreme measures against the people in their county, told them bluntly that
they themselves, by evicting 20,000 people from their homes in five years, were
the cause of the disturbances they now wanted to have put down by force.
"Property," he said "has its duties as well as its rights." The
Hogan statue of
Drummond
stands nearly opposite to the
O'Connell
in the
Dublin City Hall. Unlike the
O'Connell, it has an immediate appeal. Even in
Rome it caused a sensation, and one is not
surprised. With all its treasures,
Rome has not so many statues in which nobility
and graciousness are combined to a greater degree than here. In a sense the
Drummond
is a preparation for the
O'Connell.
Hogan completed it in 1843.
Drummond had been but a
fleeting apparition from outside in the course of Irish history. He came, a
young man of generous instincts. As far as the political system of which he was
a part allowed, he did good. And then in a bare five years he was gone to an
early grave. But
Ireland blessed his memory and
Hogan has commemorated him in his
youth and goodness. He was not, of course, flesh of
Ireland's flesh and bone of its bone, and he
probably never had the immense personal capacity for good or ill that
O'Connell had, so there was
no need for
Hogan to preoccupy himself with
such subtleties and contrasts, such counterpointing in the matter of
characterisation as in the case of
O'Connell. And similarly
with the relatively youthful springing form.
Hogan had only to give it
nobility and grace of proportion. Which, being
Hogan, was, one might say, no
trouble to him. The result of it all is that if, for a short time,
Drummond tried to treat the
Irish people well, the Irish people, as represented by a sculptor who was one
of themselves, did
Drummond proud for ever.
Very early in his career
Hogan had shown that he could
be an imaginative poet in sculpture. His classicism
[p.6]
made him not
merely a close, but a discriminating, student of nature. Thus the animals in
his shepherd and goatherd groups — there is one at the Ministry
of External Affairs
— are as fine in conception and execution as his
human figures. And right across
Europe The Drunken Faun
won immediate fame.
Then there is
Hogan's religious work. Though
it is placed beneath the alter, and is therefore not easy to study, there seems
to every justification for thinking that the
Dead Christ
at St. Teresa's Church, in
Clarendon Street, Dublin, is a not unworthy
attempt to realise at least one aspect of the most tragic and most sublime of
all tragedies. It is also one of the greatest, as it is one of the first modern
expressions of the religious sentiment of the Irish people. And I think the
small
Resurrection
group at Saint Andrew's,
Westland Row, so grave a mood, so chaste of
line, so quietly dramatic in movement, would attract attention even if it were
placed on the wall of the Duomo in
Florence, beside
Donatello's famous Annunciation. In view of all this it is a matter for regret that necessity forced
Hogan to give so much of his time
to portraiture, and that all the greater works of his maturity are portraits.
Even in portraiture he did not get the chance of expressing himself on the
subject of the two men who were the most exaltedly tragic and most naturally
graceful of all our poets,
Mangan and
Moore, though they were both
his contemporaries. It is a very great pity, for
Hogan, the lowly artist from
Cork, had to an astonishing degree the
mysterious capacity of suggesting the quality that
Aristotle describes as "greatness of soul" in his
subjects.
In his statue of
Davis,
however,
Hogan had an opportunity of
showing himself at once poet, portraitist and classicist. It now stands in the
Dublin Municipal
Gallery.
Davis was, of course,
something of a poet and something of a prophet. He was also — like the
Young Irelanders,
Gavan Duffy,
J. B. Dillon and the
ever-constant "Speranza" —a friend and an
admirer of
Hogan. It is not surprising,
therefore, to find the statue suggesting that, for the sculptor, the
commemoration of such a man and such a friend was a labour of love. The figure
is clothed in the costume of the eighteen-forties, yet it is given the youthful
grace of a Greek divinity. There is tenderness in the insistence on the turn of
the head as towards a clearly seen goal, and in the youthful purposefulness of
the expression. The eyes are the eyes of a visionary, the features are the
features of a thinker, the hands those of a man of fine sensibility. Here
again, the artist of the people paid handsome recognition to the young man of
the Ascendency intelligentsia whose
generous nature had impelled him to work and write on the side of justice and
good government.
A statue of Hibernia and Cloncurry
at Castle Lyons constitutes a record not only of the
determination of another member of the ruling class of the time to be at one
with, and work for, the people amongst whom he lived — it also
commemorates
Cloncurry's
unfailing friendship for
Hogan and, not less important,
the startling beauty of
Hogan's tenderly loved Roman
wife, who sat for the figure of Ireland. This latter figure suggests that no
sculptor of modern times had a greater capacity than
Hogan to give life and animation
to the classical type of feminine loveliness.
In the majestic bust-portrait of
Archbishop Murray
at the National
Gallery the majesty would seem to derive as much from the patient
expression as from the noble bearing. And then there is the O'Connell
statue in
Limerick. If the O'Connell
in
Dublin is
O'Connell the great
tribune, the one in
Limerick is the perfect complement, being
O'Connell the dignified yet
winning gentleman — a rôle that we know
O'Connell had at easy
command. Less heroic than the Dublin statue, the
Limerick
O'Connell is all quiet distinction, a beautiful work.
O'Connell brings
us back to Emancipation and that other outstanding protagonist of Emancipation,
J.K.L.,
John Doyle, the young
Augustinian priest who at thirty-three became Bishop of
Kildare and
Leighlin. Of him,
Hogan executed a statue
which is now in
Carlow Cathedral. It is one of the sculptor's
greatest achievements, ranking with the
Dublin
O'Connell,
the Drummond
and the Davis
. In the matter of mere æsthetic it is perhaps more
important than any of them. It puts
Hogan's classicism to its
severest test, for the Bishop's robes placed
all superficial imitation of the antique out of the question. These robes are
represented completely realistically, down to the embroideries on the cape. In
short, the classical temper, if it was to be stated here at all, had to be
realised without any external aids. But the classical temper is triumphantly
there, in the intellectual refinement of the youthful features, in the serene
courage of the lifted head and the raised right arm, in the unaffected sympathy
suggested by the protective gesture of the left arm towards the bowed figure of
Ireland. The curiously sympathetic
disinterestedness of the Greek heroic ideal is here carried over into
circumstances that, superficially considered, might seem to be utterly
un-Greek. But were they so un-Greek? The integration of the Hellenic spirit
into the Christian outlook was first successfully achieved by the later poets
of the Greek Anthology. A thousand years after them it was achieved by the
great artists of the early Renaissance in
Florence. But the late Roman Empire and the
Florence of the Renaissance were civilisations,
Hogan's
Ireland, the
Ireland of a hundred years ago, the
Ireland from which
O'Connell and
J.K.L. emerged and for
which
Drummond and
Davis fought, was not a
civilisation. It was religiously, socially and politically, the underworld of a
civilisation. But
Hogan knew that underworld, he
belonged to it, and he realised that, underworld and all as it was, it had
greatness of soul — the quality which is called Greek because it first
achieved mature expression in the art of
Greece but that, for those who have eyes to
perceive it, is to be found everywhere. That greatness of soul
Hogan had the capacity to mirror
in his work. And it is because of that capacity, revealed chiefly in these few
statues of men who, to the best of their varied abilities, gave effective
expression to the needs of the Irish people a hundred years ago, that
John Hogan ranks as a supreme artist.