Nathaniel Hone

Nathaniel Hone was one of the most important Irish landscape painters of his generation. He is sometimes referred to as Nathaniel Hone the Younger in order to distinguish him from his great granduncle, a portrait painter of the same name, who was a founder-member of the Royal Academy in London in the 18th century. Hone was born in Dublin where his father was a prominent merchant and railway director. Having entered university to study engineering and science at a very early age, he graduated in 1850 and began working as an engineer on the Midland Great Western Railway in Ireland. Three years later at the age of twenty-one he decided instead to study painting and went to Paris, where he entered the ateliers first of Adolphe Yvon and then of Thomas Couture. Towards the end of the 1850s he left Paris for the village of Barbizon where a group of painters led by Theodore Rousseau and Millet were espousing an independent style of landscape painting to which the young artist readily ascribed. Hone made France his home for nearly twenty years before finally returning to Ireland in c. 1872. In Ireland he continued to paint pure landscape, particularly of pastureland and the sea, though he remained loyal to the ideals of the Barbizon school.