Cork In 50 Artworks, No 47: Whipping the Herring out of Town, by Nathaniel Grogan
A detail from Whipping the Herring out of Town – A Scene of Cork, by Nathaniel Grogan. Courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery
In the Christian religion, Lent is observed as a period of fasting to commemorate the 40 days Jesus is said to have spent in the desert before taking up his ministry. The event is marked in various ways all over the world. In Ireland, it generally begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Easter Sunday.
In Cork in the late 18th century, the end of Lent was marked by a procession through the streets. After abstaining from meat for 40 days, the people were heartily sick of eating fish, and so they strapped a single herring to a pole and beat it with sticks as they carried it down to the River Lee.
There it was flung in the water, and replaced with a leg of lamb, which, depending on one’s level of cynicism, could be seen as representing Jesus, or the interests of the local butchers who are believed to have founded the tradition.
The Cork artist Nathaniel Grogan captured the occasion in his painting in oils, Whipping the Herring out of Town – A Scene of Cork, which he is believed to have made around 1800. The painting is now in the collection of the Crawford Art Gallery.
“It’s quite a crude artwork in some ways,” says Anne Boddaert, a curator at the Crawford. “Grogan was not a wonderful painter. He’s good at rendering architecture, but how he depicts people can be almost cartoonish. But at the same time, Whipping the Herring is a very enjoyable picture.
“The main figure is a man holding the herring aloft on a pole. Even though it’s tiny, you can see the herring; it hasn’t been beaten yet, but there’s another guy who’s about to hit it. And then there’s the woman who’s being knocked over by a wild boar, chased by a dog. I think the dog is biting the boar’s ear.
"And then, on the bottom right, there is someone with a hat, who looks like he’s collecting money, and there’s a woman holding her baby, who looks like she’s trying to protect it.”
Grogan went to some pains to illustrate how the tradition of whipping the herring was very much a lower-class pursuit. “In the background, you can see two people on a carriage, but they’re leaving town, by North Gate Bridge. They’re obviously from a higher class, and they’re not part of the revelry. There’s also a gentleman on a horse, and it doesn’t look like he’s at all interested in the shenanigans either. That would have been quite common in Grogan’s work, showing the distinction between the social classes.”
Grogan’s own origins were modest. The son of a woodturner, he was born around 1740. “His family don’t seem to have approved of his interest in art, so he left to join the British Army in the colonial wars. He spent time in the United States and the West Indies, and also in London, but we don’t know if he made any paintings in those places. There’s very few records, but then again, it could be that more of his paintings will still be discovered.”
Some of Grogan’s best-known works include Boats on the River Lee Below Tivoli, which is in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland, and The Potato Market, which is in a private collection. “We borrowed The Potato Market for an exhibition some years ago. There was some debate at the time on whether the potato market depicted in the painting was in Cork. But subsequent research showed that it was more likely to have been the potato market in Limerick.”
At some point, probably before he joined the army, Grogan studied under the Cork landscape artist John Butts. Their painting styles are similar, and the authorship of their works has often been confused, a situation examined in the Crawford Art Gallery exhibition, A Question of Attribution: The Arcadian Landscapes of Nathaniel Grogan and John Butts, in 2012.
The exhibition featured Butts’ best-known painting, View of Cork, which was attributed to his student for many years. “But it’s too fine a work to be Grogan’s,” says Boddaert. “He’s a good painter in parts, but always a bit rough around the edges.”
The great historical painter James Barry was a contemporary of Grogan’s, and also studied under Butts for a time. “But Barry had a lot of advantages over Grogan,” says Boddaert. “He was sponsored by [the Irish politician and philosopher] Edmund Burke, and got to travel to France and Italy, before establishing himself as a professional artist in London.”
For all his limitations, it appears that Grogan, on his retirement from soldiering, worked as an artist around Cork up to his passing in 1807, painting landscapes and scenes of everyday life, including local industries such as ironworking and paper making. He also painted murals in big houses, including a decorative ceiling at the now-derelict Vernon Mount House near Douglas, which was destroyed by fire in 2016.
As to his Crawford painting and the tradition it depicts, it is not known when the whipping the herring was abandoned, but it is believed to have survived well into the 19th century.
