Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art

Chapter 1. Becoming an Artist

Thomas Hovenden’s calling to become an artist and the themes of transition and the cycles of life that permeate his work stem from his childhood in Ireland. Orphaned at a young age, Hovenden experienced loss and longing from which he would draw inspiration for many of his most successful genre paintings; his recurring motifs of family life, the continuity of family ties, and shared values undoubtedly reflect his own need for a reassuring sense of permanence and stability . In turn, Hovenden’s themes resonated with late nineteenth-century audiences at a time when increasing industrialization and urbanization threatened family bonds and traditional ways. Despite the difficult circumstances of his early years, it was Hovenden’s orphaned status that led to his initial art education and apprenticeship in Ireland, and, eventually, to his studies in New York and Paris, where he mastered the sophisticated figural style, color harmonies, and painterly effects that characterize his mature work. Hovenden was born on December 28, 1840, in Dunmanway, County Cork, Ireland, the son of Ellen Bryan and Robert Hovenden, who were married in 1834. His father, of English ancestry and Protestant faith, was Keeper of the Bridewell, or prison, in Dunmanway, an English colony since the mid-seventeenth century. Hovenden grew up with an older brother, John, and a sister, Elizabeth, and spent his first years in that “pleasant,” little “market and post town,” with one street about a half mile long, a Protestant church, a Catholic chapel, and a Methodist Meeting House.1 At the time of the disastrous Potato Famine when Hovenden was only a boy of six, his parents died.The child was taken from his home and placed in an orphanage about thirty-seven miles away in Cork. Most likely, the orphanage had similar admission and apprenticeship requirements as the Blue-Coat School, one of Cork’s oldest charities, which operated a house for poor boys; generally, boys were admitted at the age of eight years and then apprenticed at the age of fourteen.2 By the year of Hovenden’s birth, the ancient city of Cork had become the second-most substantial city in Ireland, exceeded only by Dublin in size, commercial importance, and population. Its setting—centered in a green valley enclosed by high hills “through which the Lee [River] pursues its course to the sea”—was one of natural beauty.Water was everywhere and Cork boasted Chapter  Becoming an Artist He was called before the Council of the Academy ...and strongly encouraged to give up all other pursuits for art. —“Advent of a Great American Painter:Thomas Hovenden,” Studio and Musical Review  ( February ):. six bridges spanning the Lee for its population of over a hundred thousand.3 For an orphaned lad grieving for absent parents, anguished by probable separation from siblings, and remembering a small country village and rural life, Cork must have seemed a strangely different and lonely place.At a very tender age,Thomas Hovenden learned about loss and heartache. As the charity school required, Hovenden began an apprenticeship at fourteen years of age, working with George Tolerton, a cabinetmaker and “carver and gilder in Cork.” Hovenden’s aptitude for drawing so impressed Tolerton that in 1858, after three years of a seven-year apprenticeship , the master sent the seventeen-year-old Hovenden to the newly established Cork School of Design for classes a few days a week at a cost of only several shillings a quarter.Tolerton must have believed that the training would further his pupil’s usefulness in his continuing apprenticeship and prepare him to be a journeyman on his own.4 The school was one of the branch art schools of design set up by the British government’s Department of Science andArt in response to a growing concern for good design in handcrafted and manufactured products, a concern that became more pronounced when manufactured goods were exhibited alongside works of the decorative and fine arts at the first international exposition held in South Kensington, London, in 1851. Following the exposition, the department bought land at the site of the fair and, in 1857, located itsArt Training School and the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria andAlbert Museum) there with the goal of reforming art training to improve contemporary design.5 Hovenden’s first artistic training at the Cork School was based on the South Kensington Normal School of Design’s philosophy as well as on the ideas of the influential British author and art critic John...