Lawrence William White evaluates the career of Irish-born artist Thomas Hovenden whose humanitarian values found resonance in post-civil war America.
The name Thomas Hovenden is not a familiar one, either in his native country of Ireland, or his adoptive country of the USA. Yet for a brief period in the 1880s and early 1890s, this Cork-born painter was among the most popular, beloved, and commercially successful artists in America, his pictures of rural domestic life and historical vignette being enthusiastically acclaimed by critics, collectors, and a wide public. Within just a few years of his tragic and untimely death, however, his style and subject matter had slipped swiftly out of fashion, consigning his reputation to a brief mention, at best, in the annals of American art, until his gradual rediscovery by art historians in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Janet Mullarney’s sculptures perform as metaphors, not portraits, writes Cliodhna Shaffrey