Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art

Notes

CHAPTER 1. BECOMING AN ARTIST 1. Cork’s Marriage License Bonds Indexes record Robert Hovenden and Ellen Bryan as parties to a bond in 1834. Only in 1864 did civil registration of births, deaths, and marriages in Ireland begin . For this information I am indebted to Timothy Cadogan, Executive Librarian, Reference Department , Cork County Library, Cork, Ireland, Cadogan to author, 4 November 1988. Most specific biographical sources for Hovenden’s earliest years are Dictionary of American Biography and Dictionary of Irish Artists.Hovenden’s widow approved the Rev. Ernest Pfatteicher’s manuscript “Thomas Hovenden,” Book News Monthly 25 (January 1907): 300–305, referred to as the “first authentic biography .” Information about Hovenden’s two siblings is pieced together from unpublished letters, private collections. No reference found to other siblings. On Dunmanway, the Rev. Charles Bernard Gibson, The History of the County and City of Cork,2 vols. (London:Thos. C. Newby, 1861), 2: 508–10. 2. Sometimes boys under eight years or a year or two older were admitted to the Blue-Coat School (the “Register of the Boys of St. Stephen’s Hospital, Cork” for 1780–85); 1780 lists boys from age six to ten. Cadogan thought that Hovenden perhaps was sent to the Blue-Coat School, letter to author, 4 November 1988; however, the registers of St. Stephen’s Hospital from 1750–1990 show no Hovenden (Charles H. Jermyn of Cork to author, 1 February 1990). Michael V. Conlon, “Some Old Cork Charities” (Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 1943), 86; also “Register of the Boys of St. Stephen’s Hospital” from 1780–85, 47, copies courtesy Cadogan to author, 4 November 1988. Hovenden’s parents probably died because of the famine of 1845–48 when thousands upon thousands in County Cork either died of starvation or emigrated . See Gibson, History of the County, 2: 528. No information is available about their deaths. 3. JohnWindele, Notices of the City of Cork and Its Vicinity (Cork: Messrs. Bolster, 1840), [1], 2. 4. For “carver and gilder,”Walter G. Strickland, Dictionary of Irish Artists, vol. 1 (Dublin and London: Maunsel & Company, 1913), 528.“Tolerton” was probably George Tolerton who had a cabinetmaking and upholstery business at Morrison’s Quay, Cork, in the 1860s and died in 1881, according to Cadogan , based on Cork directories of 1863 and 1867 (Cadogan to author, 4 November 1988). Gibson, History of the County,2: 319, writing in 1861, stated that the cost at the Cork School was only ten shillings a quarter for three days a week instruction because the government paid part of the teacher’s salary, awarded prizes, and made other contributions . For Hovenden’s going to the school at age seventeen, see “Advent of a GreatAmerican Painter: Thomas Hovenden,” Studio and Musical Review 1 (19 February 1881), 51. Hovenden turned seventeen on 28 December 1857, so he was seventeen for almost all of 1858; therefore, I figure his age as of the next year when referring to a span of time. NOTES 5. For concern for improved design and reform, see Doreen Bolger Burke, Jonathan Freedman , et al., In pursuit of Beauty:Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (NewYork: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), preface, 19–20; chapter 1, 25–27; chapter 5, 143–44. Particularly helpful on Britain’s schools of design, John Ruskin’s ideas that decorators should study at art school and from nature, repercussions of the reform of Normal Training schools for art education in Europe and the United States, and how the American Aesthetic movement derived from British reform ideas: chapter 1, 25–27; chapter 2, 45, 54–59, 60–62, 65; chapter 9, 326–27. 6. On James Brenan,“Heritage 5 [p. 5] 4th,” from unsigned, typed manuscript pages about Crawford MunicipalArt Gallery and Cork School of Design. Copy, courtesy of Peter Murray, Curator, Crawford MunicipalArt Gallery, Cork, Ireland. For one branch of BritishAestheticism, that of John Ruskin and laterWilliam Morris, who saw the machine as a threat to the beauty of craftsmanship, and another branch of reformers, the “so-called South Kensington group” wanting to redesign the machine-made into a more artful product, see Sylvia L.Yount,“‘Give the PeopleWhat TheyWant’:The AmericanAesthetic Movement,ArtWorlds, and Consumer Culture, 1876–1890” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995), 7. 7. For the Cork School’s purpose and student aspirations, see South Kensington Museum, Art directory,containing regulation for promoting instruction in art with appendix (London: George E. Eyre and W. Spottiswoode, 1876), 39–43. On...