Neville Coghill

Early Irish Photographer: Sir John Joscelyn Coghill

Castlehaven. – an important record of what the castle looked like before it fell down

In last week’s post, which I called a Trailer, I introduced this Early Irish Photographer. Congrats to Elizabeth and Sean who knew the identity of the mystery man. The photographer was Sir John Joscelyn Coghill, 4th Baronet, uncle to Edith Somerville (Adelaide, Coghill’s sister, was her mother) and father of Neville and Egerton Coghill. Neville was to die a hero’s death at the Battle of Isandlwana during the Zulu wars, and Egerton was to marry his first cousin, Edith’s sister Hildegard. 

JJC (as he often styled himself) moved to Castletownsend in 1860, bringing with him a large family and several good-looking sisters, including Adelaide. Edith described him as my Uncle, Sir Joscelyn Coghill, leader of the second wave of invasion, with a photographic camera (the first ever seen in West Carbery) and a tripod. He used all his friends and relations as subjects, including himself (above).

Glen Barahane, originally called Laputa, in honour of Dean Swift who had once visited Castletownshend

By this time he was already an established photographer, although this was only one of his many avocations. He came from a wealthy family and had grown up in Belvedere House, Drumcondra in Dublin. According to his entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB):

Coghill . . . took a special interest in photography in the early 1850s, when wet-plate photography and a number of photographic paper processes became available to amateur photographers. He was present at the inaugural meeting of the Dublin Photographic Society (1854–8) on 1 November 1854 and was elected honorary secretary. He served a term as president and three terms as vice-president. In May 1858 the DPS changed its name to the Photographic Society of Ireland and amalgamated with the fine arts section of the RDS.

JJC travelled widely on the continent, writing about his photography trips and offering advice to others (e.g. Seek official permission to photograph public buildings, and, if crowds gather when a camera is taken out, do not show irritation, but encourage them to be your ally rather than your enemy.) He was a staunch defender of photography as art – a hard sell with many traditionalists. From the DIB:

In May 1858 Henry McManus, RHA, headmaster of the school of art in the RDS, delivered a lecture on art in which he pointed out that the artist’s craft could not be superseded by mechanical means. The artist’s hand required the guidance of intelligence, McManus said, and this action could not be imitated by the use of machinery, however ingeniously contrived. Coghill differed with McManus on this occasion, and later in the year (November), when he replied more fully in a lecture at the RDS, Coghill described how photographers should study and reflect on art principles and not be mere servile copyists. He believed that photographers should use their intellect, taste, and judgement on the subject matter in front of the camera lens and so raise their photographic work from the mechanical to the sphere of art.

JJC was an immediate favourite in Castletownshend, along with his brother, Kendal, with whom he was close. They brought with them an interest in spiritualism and infected everyone with it.

Her Coghill uncles Joscelyn and Kendall thrilled her by their psychic feats. On 3 April 1878 she records: “Mother heard from Uncle Jos (Sir Joscelyn Coghill Bart, the head of the family) who was at a grand seance and was levitated, chair and all, until he could touch the ceiling.’ Professor Neville Coghill his grandson has informed me of the tradition that the Baronet signed his name on the ceiling in pencil.


Somerville and Ross, A Biography by Maurice Collis,  Faber and Faber 1968

JJC’s daughter, Ethel, Edith’s first cousin and Castletownshend ‘twin’ wrote this about her father:

He was a real peter pan – a boy who never grew up in many ways, full of enthusiasms of all kinds, whether it were yachting, music, painting, writing, acting, photography, spiritualism, speculation – all had their turn and he flung himself into each and all with a fervour that lasted at fever heat for a time. At one time after my mother’s death [1881] he and his brother Kendal took a house in London for some months. To it they brought a considerable amount of the family plate and a presentation set of gold belonging to my uncle, as well as my grandfather’s medals and other valuable things. They left the house for some weeks in charge of two maids, who promptly brought in their young men, cleared the house of nearly all the valuables and had the cheek to order a sumptuous luncheon in my father’s name and a landau in which they went to [the races]. My father was in Ireland when the telegram came to inform him of what had happened. I did not see him for some time afterwards. By then, he had come to look on the thing as a huge joke. Nothing was ever recovered, but he felt as though he had been part of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, and this compensated him for everything he had lost.


Edith Somerville, A Biography by Gifford Lewis. Four Courts Press .2005

The Coghills lived in Glenn Barrahane (no longer there) and the house was the centre of many activities – amateur theatricals, singing, séances, painting expeditions. The Somervilles, his nieces and nephews, adored him and his brother Kendal. He must have had a good relationship also with their father, his brother-in-law, Henry Thomas Somerville, as he often cast him in ‘character studies.’ – Henry, in turn, must have been good-humoured and patient.

But tragedy struck too – Neville was only 26 when he died at Isandlwana in 1879. He was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously, in 1907. When he died his younger brother, Egerton, became the heir. Originally wealthy, the family’s fortunes suffered several setbacks and most of their fortune was wiped out by bad investments. As Maurice Collis puts it, On 29 November, 1905, at the age of 79, sir Joscelyn Coghill died, and life changed dramatically for Hildegard and Egerton, who inherited the baronetcy and a load of troubles.

Egerton and Hildegard were so hard up they had to wait seven years before they could marry. Egerton died suddenly in London in 1921, and Ireland (and especially West Cork) was in such upheaval that it was many months before his body could be taken home. Read more about Egerton in my Post Harry Clarke, Egerton Coghill and the St Luke Window in Castletownshend. And more about jolly Uncle Kendal in The Gift of Harry Clarke.

Although far removed from Dublin, JCC chaired “the photographic committee of the Dublin International Exhibition (1865) [and] was credited with the success of the photographic section” (DIB). He continued to exhibit up to the mid-1870s, winning prizes for his photographs.  I have included in this post photographs taken by JJC in and around West Cork. They constitute an invaluable record of people and places, taken between 1860 and his death in 1905.

For example, the photo above, detail below, is of a “Squatter’s Hut, in Rineen (the same bridge I featured last week). It’s a fascinating and important image, as it is the only photograph I have ever seen of one of the miserable cabins (known as fourth-class housing), made of sod, in which many of the poorest people lived in West Cork before the Famine.

I am not sure how these photographs arrived into the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, but many of the images are now freely available on their website, copyright-free, and we are grateful for that. You can browse the whole collection for yourself. You can also visit St Barrahane’s Church in Castletownshend and see the fine windows for yourself, including this one by Powells of London, dedicated to JJC and his son, Neville. Can you spot the Victoria Cross?

There are other memorials to JJC in that church too – take a look next time you’re there. I will leave you for now with one of JJC’s landscape photos, of a Glengarriff waterfall – a masterful shot for what was, at that time, quite a difficult subject to capture, moving water.

Harry Clarke, Egerton Coghill and the St Luke Window in Castletownshend

Remarkably, there are three Harry Clarke stained glass windows in one small West Cork village – in St Barrahane’s Church of Ireland church, in Castletownshend. The smallest of the three windows is the St Luke, inset into the south wall of the chancel. It is a miniature masterpiece, designed with extraordinary attention to detail by Harry, and executed in his studio.

The iconography that was chosen was specific to the subject – St Luke as Patron Saint of Painters. That’s because this was a memorial window to Egerton Coghill – more correctly Sir Egerton Bushe Coghill, 5th Baronet Coghill.

Egerton Coghill, left, with his painting companion Herbert Baxter*

Egerton had grown up in Castletownshend, one of a large family of Coghills who lived in a rambling house called Glen Barrahane, and who seemed to be related in multiple ways to all the other families who lived in and around Castletownshend. His father (Sir John Jocelyn, one of Ireland’s earliest photographers) was the brother of Adelaide, who had married Thomas Henry Somerville, mother of the Somerville family that included (among others) Edith (see Stories and Stained Glass), Boyle (see Boyle Somerville: Ireland’s First Archaeoastronomer and Boyle’s Bealtaine), and Hildegard. Hildegard eventually married Egerton, her first cousin. To Edith and Boyle, therefore, Egerton was both first cousin and brother-in-law.

To Edith he was also a childhood playmate, a best friend and a great supporter and artistic mentor. In periods of distress for her he encouraged her to concentrate on her work – first art and then writing, and he loaned her money when the going got tough. Everyone loved him, it seems. He gave up a career in engineering to devote himself to painting and his limited private means allowed him to study abroad. When he and Hildegard fell in love their families were delighted, but they had to wait seven years to be able to afford to marry.

Egerton and Hildegard on their wedding day

As a painter, Egerton was strongly influenced by the Impressionists. He painted en plein air, drawn to landscape and to muted colours. He loved to capture the scenery around Castletownshend, or the village itself, as in this charming depiction of the main street.

The Mall from Malmaison (Courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum)

He was accomplished and well-known in his day, exhibiting widely and selling well. A scholarship at Oxford, for landscape painting, is named in his honour. Now, he seems to have faded from memory, and images of his paintings are hard to find online.

Field of Rye, Barbizon (Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum)

Egerton’s older brother, Neville, was killed at the Battle of Isandlwana during the Zulu Wars – Robert has developed a talk on West Cork Links to the Zulu Wars and will no doubt write a post about Neville eventually. One of the windows in St Barrahane’s (not a Harry Clarke) is dedicated to his memory. When Neville died, Egerton inherited the title and moved back permanently to Castletownshend with Hildegard and his children. Egerton himself died unexpectedly in England in 1921 during the upheavals caused by the War of Independence at home in Ireland, so it was some time before his body could be brought back to St Barrahane’s for burial. According to Edith, The whole country came to the funeral, and all the men competed for the privilege of putting a shoulder to the coffin, for even a few steps.

When Edith and Hildegard were able to consider a permanent memorial for their beloved Egerton it was naturally to Harry Clarke that they turned. Edith had been entranced immediately by Harry’s work when she travelled up to Cork, on the advice of her brother Cameron, in 1916 to view the windows in the Honan Chapel. She wrote to Cameron afterwards to thank him. She was nothing short of stunned by Harry’s windows and “the quality of burning and furious brilliance that I have never seen anywhere else. . . his windows have a kind of hellish splendour”.

Edith in her Master of the Foxhounds habit, about the age she was when Egerton died

Since then, Edith had worked with Harry to install the Nativity window in 1918 (it was his first public commission) as a memorial to her grandparents, and again in 1921 on the Kendall Coghill window (Egerton’s bachelor-soldier uncle and a universal family favourite) about which I wrote in my post The Gift of Harry Clarke. She now asked him to take on this new commission, and Harry, who had known and liked Egerton, promised to pay special attention to this project.

St Luke, Patron Saint of Painters, is depicted with a palette and brushes, with the Madonna’s face appearing on the palette

The design he came up with is exquisite, and every detail is important. St Luke, perhaps better known to most of us as one of the four gospel writers, is also the Patron Saint of Painters. This is based on the tradition that he painted the first image of Mary, and that image became an early Christian icon. In Harry’s design, Luke holds a painter’s palette and brushes, and the image of Mary appears like a ghostly presence on the palette.

Luke, with St Cecelia to the left and St John, holding a chalice, to the right

Luke himself is a typical Harry creation, with his huge eyes, forked beard, and expression full of compassion. His right hand, with long tapered fingers and a sleeve point (Harry loved those), holds a brush. His hat and garments are elaborately rendered in blue, scarlet and purple. His sandals, thong style, are complex twists of leather straps.

Besides the Luke and the Madonna images, there are four other sacred figures in the window. One of the unique joys of this window is that you can get close enough to it to see these tiny figures clearly, since it is at eye level (it helps to be tall). The first, on the left side of the window is St Fidelio, dressed as a bishop (below). Although one author asserts that Egerton was born on St Fidelio’s name day, I have been unable to confirm that or to find any information at all about St Fidelio, but obviously this saint had meaning to Egerton, or to the Somerville sisters, or perhaps it was a reference to Egerton’s faithfulness. However, it could, like St Cecilia, be another musical reference, to Beethoven’s opera, Fidelio. In fact, most of the figures appear to relate to secular aspects of Egerton’s life, while thinly disguised as the kind of saintly images suitable for a church window. I can almost hear Harry, Edith and Hildegard chuckling over the choices, knowing that Egerton, who had his full share of boisterous Coghill humour, would thoroughly approve of the coded messages.

To the left of Luke’s shoulder is St Cecilia. Egerton loved music, had a fine voice, and performed happily in the musical theatre that was a staple of family life within the Castletownshend circle. Gilbert and Sullivan was a favourite. But this is also a nod to Edith – Cecilia is shown playing an organ while the organ that Edith played for over 50 years occupies the loft at the other end of the church (below).

Finally, at the top of the window, across from each other, are St John and St Barrahane. Barrahane, after whom the church is named (and who is pictured also in Harry’s nativity window in the same church) is the local saint, and the Coghill house was called Glen Barrahane in deference to that tradition. The tonsured monk is holding up a church (below). John was both his father’s and his grandfather’s (Baron Plunkett) name.

Egerton’s coat of arms, the dedication plaque, and Harry’s signature round out the window.

At this time, the Harry Clarke Studio was experiencing enormous demand for his work. To satisfy this demand he employed a group of highly talented artists and craftsmen, all of whom were trained to faithfully execute his designs, with Harry supervising closely. Thus it was with this window – most of it in fact was made while Harry was out of the country. The fact that he did not personally do most of the etching, staining and painting on this window does not in any way detract from its identification as a true Harry Clarke window – in every meaningful sense this was his creation and his signature indicates that he took full credit for the final product.

If you go to St Barrahane’s, make sure that you open the gate in the altar rails and go right up to the little window in the chancel. People have been known to miss it. It’s a unique opportunity to get nose-to-nose with a Harry Clarke. And when you do, spare a kind thought also for Egerton, a fellow artist, beloved by all who knew him, and honoured in this exquisite work of art.

*The four black and White photographs are from Edith Somerville: A Biography, by Gifford Lewis. I could find no copyright information on them so am assuming they are available for use, with gratitude to the author and publisher, Four Courts Press. The photograph of Edith as MFH is in my own possession.