Mr Hogan is not, as generally supposed, a native of Cork: he was born at Tallow, in the county of Waterford, in 1800, where his father carried on the business of a builder. He is of good family, both by the paternal and maternal sides; his father being of the old Dalcassian tribe of the O’Hogans, the chiefs of whom were located in the seventeenth century at Ardcrony, in the county of Tipperary, four miles and a half to the north of Nenagh, where the remains of their castle and church are still to be seen. By the mother’s side he is descended from the celebrated Sir Richard Cox, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland in the reign of William and Mary, and Lord Chancellor in that of Queen Anne, his mother, Frances Cox, being the great-granddaughter of that eminent individual. Having received the ordinary school education, he was placed by his father, in the year 1812, under an attorney in Cork, named Michael Footte, with a view to his ultimately embracing the legal profession, and in this situation he remained for two years. This was the most unhappy period of his existence; for, like Chantrey, the greatest of British sculptors, who was also articled to an attorney, being endowed by nature expressly to become an artist, the original bias of his mind to drawing and carving had by this time become a passion; and despite of the frequent chastisements his master bestowed on him, in the exuberance of his zeal to curb what he considered his idle propensities, his whole soul was given, not to law, but to the Fine Arts, and an artist he became accordingly. His father and his master seeing the utter uselessness of any further attempts to divert his mind from its apparently destined course, he was released from his irksome employment, and at the age of fourteen entered the office of Mr Deane, now Sir Thomas Deane, of Cork, as an apprentice, where he was soon employed as a draughtsman and carver of models, with a view to his becoming ultimately an architect. In Mr Deane he found a master who had the intellect to enable him to appreciate his talents, and the good feeling to induce him to encourage them; and the first use he made of the chisels with which his patron supplied him, was to produce a carving in wood of a female skeleton the size of life, on which Dr Woodroffe for a season was able to lecture his pupils, as if it were, what it actually seems, a real skeleton in form and colour. Under the instruction of this gentleman Mr Hogan studied anatomy for several years, during which period he made for his improvement many carvings in wood of hands and feet, and also essayed his talents on a figure of Minerva the size of life, which still remains over the entrance of the Life and Fire Insurance Office in the South Mall.