Letitia Marion Hamilton

Letitia Hamilton was one of eight children of a Protestant Anglo-Irish family who lived in a large house in Co. Meath. Her family had an interesting artistic heritage; her great-grandmother (Caroline Hamilton) was a professional artist and a distant cousin was the watercolour painter, Rose Barton. These examples may have encouraged her to regard art as a career and may also have inspired her sister Eva, another artist.

Letitia Hamilton showed artistic promise from an early age and one of her teachers was John Butler Yeats. However, she was late in developing her professional career and did not exhibit her work until 1904. She began her studies at the Dublin Metropolitan School of art in 1907 at the age of twenty-nine, where she was taught by one of Ireland's leading artists, William Orpen. She was not greatly influenced by his strongly academic style but instead she was initially influenced by the Impressionist and her later enamelwork reveals a knowledge of Art Nouveau.

She continued her artistic studies abroad, studying with frank Brangwyn in Belgium and also in London. Her love of travel remained with her, and she painted in France, Yugoslavia and particularly in Italy, spending mush time in Venice.

Her mature style, which developed in the 1920s, is marked by her frequent use of the palette knife. Her favourite subjects are landscapes, market scenes and hunting scenes. She exhibited regularly in Dublin, London and Scotland and continued painting until the end of her life.