John Fergus O'Hea, self-caricature, 1897-98
John Fergus O'Hea (b. ca. 1838; d. 2 September 1922) was a political cartoonist from Cork who sometimes published under the pseudonym Spex. He was the son of James O'Hea, a barrister who was active in the Young Ireland movement and had been secretary to Daniel O'Connell. He initially trained in medicine in Nice, but dropped out, instead studying art at the Cork School of Design from 1857 to 1860. He painted trade union banners for Cork parades in the 1860s, 70s and 80s.
In the late 1860s he became the primary cartoonist for A. M. Sullivan's nationalist Weekly News in Dublin, his drawings usually appearing on the front page. He attacked the British government for their heavy-handed censorship in sentencing Sullivan to six months in Richmond Gaol for seditious libel, and visited Sullivan in prison five times.
In 1870 O'Hea and Sullivan founded the humorous magazine Zozimus, an Irish answer to Punch. O'Hea was chief artist and drew the covers. In its second year Richard Dowling became editor. Other cartoonists who contributed included Harry Furniss and Wallis Mackay. In 1872, after Zozimus folded, he moved to London and contributed to an Irish-run magazine called Tomahawk, which only lasted a few issues.
Back in Dublin in 1874, O'Hea, Dowling and Edwin Hamilton founded Ireland's Eye. After the style of Vanity Fair, each issue featured a colour caricature of a notable person, drawn by O'Hea under the name "Spex". Two editions of each issue were published, one at 6d with the cartoon in colour, the other at 3d with the cartoon in black and white. Ireland's Eye closed in 1876, after which O'Hea and Hamilton revived Zozimus as Zoz. O'Hea drew a full or double page cartoon in each issue until it too folded two years later. In 1879 O'Hea and Hamilton launched a new magazine, Pat, which ran until 1883 and from 1881 also featured cartoons by Thomas Fitzpatrick.
In the 1880s O'Hea contributed a large colour weekly political cartoon to the Weekly Freeman, a weekly nationalist newspaper. He also drew cartoons for The Nation, and created poster-sized lithographs for the Christmas issues of magazines such as the Shamrock, Young Ireland and The Sunshine. He was on staff at the Weekly Freeman from 1893 to 1896. For a time he was manager of the pictorial department of the Evening Telegraph.
O'Hea's talents were highly regarded, even by those who did not share his nationalist politics. In 1883 the conservative British journal St. Stephen's Review described O'Hea as an "out-and-out nationalist", but also as "one of the cleverest artists in the three kingdoms" who "could be making his thousands per annum if he cared to live in London, where he is well known and highly thought of;" instead he "draws his most marvellous cartoons for the most miserable of Irish comic papers." In 1890 William Ewart Gladstone gave "a high testimony to the ability and principle of the Weekly Freeman artist" and described his pencil as "directly guided by a spirit of patriotism".
In January 1897 he delivered an illustrated lecture on "Irish Caricaturists and Cartoonists" to the Irish Literary Society in London. He lived in London from the 1893 until his death. Towards the end of his career, in 1914-15, he drew cartoons for Thomas Fitzpatrick's magazine The Lepracaun, during Fitzpatrick's final illness.
Cartoon gallery
See also Category:Freeman's Journal. Many, if not most, of the uncredited cartoons are by O'Hea.
References
- Theo Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists: 20th Century, Merlin Publishing, 2002
- B. P. Bowen, "Dublin Humourous Periodicals of the 19th Century", Dublin Historical Record Vol 13 No 1, 1952, pp. 2-11
- Lewis P. Curtis Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, David & Charles, 1971
- Roy Douglas, Liam Harte & Jim O'Hara, Drawing Conclusions: a Cartoon History of Anglo-Irish Relations 1798-1998, The Blackstaff Press, 1998
- Joel A. Hollander, Coloured Political Lithographs as Irish Propaganda, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007
- Athol Mayhew, A jorum of "Punch" with those who helped to brew it : being the early history of "The London Charivari", 1895, p. 149
- Irish News, New Zealand Tablet, 15 September 1893
- Biography at Scoop! (subscription required)
- Collins Collection of Irish Political Cartoons, University of Illinois
- Case Studies in Irish History No 4: The Elections of 1885-86
- Ireland in Schools: The 'Irish card' in the 1885-86 general elections
- Multitext Project in Irish History, Home Rule: the elections of 1885 and 1886, University College Cork