1800 - 1835

Sculptor. He was the fourth son of Lawrence Gahagan, and the brother of the sculptors Lucius and Vincent Gahagan He was born in Dublin, but came to England, where he worked as a marble carver to Joseph Nollekens. Nollekens left Gahagan £100 in his will, but the money only reached him much later, by which time he had had been reduced to great poverty. In 1809 he received a premium from the Society of Arts for a group of Samson Breaking the Bonds. His most important commissions were for a statue of the Duke of Kent for the top of Portland Place, which Gahagan won in a competition in 1823, and the multi-figure Memorial to Sir Thomas Picton (1815) in St Paul’s Cathedral. In 1831 he executed what turned out to be the last statue in the “line of Kings” for the Royal Exchange in the City of London, that of Ggeorge IV. He also executed the monument to Dr Charles Burney in Westminster Abbey, whose main feature is a copy of Nollekens’s bust of Burney. A number of portrait busts figure amongst the works which he exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1802 and 1835. None of the subject pieces which he showed at the Royal Academy and the British Institution is known to survive.