Born in Ballincollig in 1885 just outside Cork, his father William was originally a teacher and historian until he lost his job after serving a term in prison after the Fenian Rising of 1867. Joseph originally got work as a clerk at the tea and coffee merchants Newsom & Sons where he became friendly with fellow worker Terence MacSwiney. Higgins soon got attracted to the Crawford School of Art a few streets away and enrolled as a night student in 1906. He married fellow student Katherine Turnbull
in 1915 and they moved and settled in Youghal. Both won several prizes at the school and at exhibition including the Cork Exhibition Scholarship and the RDS and received good reviews at the RHA. Two of his best known pieces ''Strachaire Fir'' and ''Toiler of the sea'' are in the Collection of The Crawford Gallery. When Higgins died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-nine in 1925, he left behind a small but substantial body of work, of which nineteen sculptures survive. However these works were never cast in bronze within his lifetime, due to the expense of the material.
Following Higgins’ death Seamus Murphy, fellow Cork sculptor who married Higgins’ daughter in 1944, cast them in bronze. Murphy said of Higgins “it has delight for everyone who looks at it, but a fellow craftsman gets even more than that. He sees how the material was respected, how the problem of design was solved, the masses arranged in relation to one another, the shapes broken up by shadows skilfully placed as accents of light.”
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