Munster in 30 Artworks, No 26: Boy with a Boat, Fitzgerald's Park, Cork
Boy with a Boat, by Joseph Higgins, at Fitzgerald's Park, Cork. Picture: Marc O'Sullivan Vallig
Joseph Higgins had the misfortune to be a prodigiously gifted painter and sculptor at a time when there was very little market for Irish art. When he died of tuberculosis at the age of 40 in 1925, he was largely unknown outside of Cork, had never sold a work for more than £35, and had never once secured a formal commission.
He did, however, exhibit regularly at the RHA in Dublin, and won a number of significant prizes, including the highest award of the Annual South Kensington Scheme for Sculpture in 1910. That award was for his sculpture in clay, Boy with a Boat, which was later cast in bronze and installed in the lake in Fitzgerald’s Park.
“Joseph could never afford to have any of his sculptures cast himself,” says the artist’s grandson, Colm Murphy. “But his clay sculptures were of an incredibly high standard, and were recognised as such by the critics of the day, who compared him to Rodin.”
Higgins was a native of Ballincollig. His father William worked as a cooper at the Royal Gunpowder Mills, having lost his job as a teacher for his involvement in the Fenian Rising of 1867.
As a young man, Higgins himself found work as a clerk at the grocers and tea dealers Newsom & Sons on French Church St in Cork, where he became friends with the future Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney.
Higgins began taking night classes at the Crawford School of Art. After qualifying, he cycled around the county teaching arts and crafts. He secured a full-time teaching position in Youghal in 1915, a year after marrying fellow artist Katherine Turnbull. The two had met at art school. Among their four children was Maighréad, born in 1919, who would go on to marry the sculptor Séamus Murphy.
It was Séamus Murphy, Colm’s father, who had Boy with a Boat - and Higgins’ other sculptures in clay - cast in bronze many years after his passing. Séamus and Maighréad Murphy gifted Boy with a Boat to the city of Cork, and it was finally unveiled in Fitzgerald’s Park in 1965, joining works such as Murphy’s Madonna of the Twilight and a bust of Michael Collins, a bronze figure of a dancing girl by Oisin Kelly, and another of a female torso by Edward Delaney.
Higgins was commemorated with the first retrospective of his work at Cork City Museum in Fitzgerald’s Park in 2005. It included paintings of the Corpus Christi Parade in Youghal and the blessing of the boats in Cork harbour, as well as busts of Michael Collins and Professor WP Stockley of UCC, and paintings and sculptures of the artist’s children, Liam and Maighréad.
Higgins’ bust of Collins was famously carved from limewood salvaged from a fallen tree in a neighbour’s garden in Youghal. It was based on sketches he’d made of Collins addressing the Great Cork Treaty Meeting on the Grand Parade in March 1922, months before his death at Béal na mBláth.
Many of the works in the retrospective were loaned by the Murphy and Higgins families. “I have a number of his pieces at home, and there are more in the collection of the Crawford Art Gallery,” says Colm Murphy. “But a lot more was lost when the British blew up the Higginses’ house on Washington St during the War of Independence. Joseph’s brother Pat was a commander in the 1st Cork Brigade of the IRA, which is why the house was targeted. The British had to rebuild it later; it’s that lovely building with the spire across from the Courthouse.”
Higgins used his nephew Charlie as the model for Boy with a Boat. “Charlie is remembered for having taken a telegram bearing news of Terence McSwiney’s final arrest to his wife Muriel in Youghal. He hid it in the sole of his boot. Joseph was living in Youghal, and went with him on the last leg of the journey; they crossed the Blackwater River to Muriel’s house by boat.”
Charlie Higgins’ star sign was Cancer, hence the inclusion of a small crab in the sculpture. He grew up to become a tax inspector, and liked to joke that he was the only tax inspector in the country commemorated with a public statue.
Murphy remembers visiting his grandmother Katherine Turnbull as a child. “It was an old Elizabethan house, with an 18th century range in the kitchen. She was blind by then, but I remember her frying mackerel for me in a pan.”
Murphy’s mother Maighréad, an artist and educator passed away aged 94 in 2014. Incredibly, her younger sister Ita is still alive, and resides in a nursing home in Bruree, Co Limerick. “Ita became a nun, and taught in Malaysia. She’s 99 years old, and still sharp as a tack. She’s a great link to those times; we talk every week, and I think I benefit from our conversations more than she does.”
