Orphaned as a child by the Irish potato famine, Thomas Hovenden was apprenticed at age fourteen to a frame maker named Tolerton. With the support of the older man, he studied art at the Cork branch of London's South Kensington School of Design. Hovenden continued working as a frame maker after arriving in New York in 1863. He also enrolled in the National Academy's antique class for the 1864-65 academic season and in its life class for the 1866-67 season. He later told the undocumented story of having received a special commendation from the Academy's Council for a drawing of a Venus de Milo cast. Hovenden found additional work doing illustrations for Harper's magazine and coloring photographs. But by 1868 he had left New York for Baltimore, where he set up a studio in the home of his friend Hugh Bolton Jones. Before leaving for France in 1874, he was already established as a genre painter specializing in African-American subjects.
In Paris he studied briefly with Jules Breton before beginning a much longer period of instruction under Alexandre Cabanel. Hovenden frequented the artists' colony in Pont-Aven and began to produce paintings with subjects related to Brittany. When he returned to New York in 1880, he received a great deal of press attention and was praised for resisting the temptation to adopt Cabanel's manner. Immediately successful, Hovenden was elected a member of the Society of American Artists and an Associate of the National Academy in 1881. Elevation to full Academician followed the next year, prompting a writer at the New York Herald to comment that "the election of Mr. Hovenden, only made an associate last year, is unusual and deserved."
By this time, Hovenden had relocated to Plymouth Meeting, ancestral home of his new wife, the artist Helen Corson. For the rest of his life, Hovenden lived and worked at the Corson family farm. He specialized in genre subjects. Many of his paintings were widely reproduced, achieving great popularity-none more so than Breaking Home Ties (1890, Philadelphia Museum of Art). In 1886 he became head instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after the ouster of his controversial friend Thomas Eakins.
On August 14, 1895, Hovenden was returning home from Philadelphia when he was killed by a locomotive at a railroad crossing while attempting to save the life of a child. The memorial entered into the Academy minutes of May 13, 1896, read in part:
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He was one of the rare American painters, who, although studying the technique of his Art for six years in Paris came home and painted real American subjects, in his own original manner. He was not afraid of telling a story that appealed to the human heart of every spectator, and yet his paintings were none the less artistic for all that. All honor to the memory of one of our greatest figure painters!
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JD
