Augustus Nicholas Burke

Augustus Nicholas Burke was born in County Galway in the west of Ireland where his father was a landowner. He was educated in England and began his artistic career in London where he exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1863. In 1869 he moved to Ireland and quickly became an established figure in the Dublin art world, exhibiting landscapes, animal subjects and portraits at the Royal Hibernian Academy where he was professor of painting from 1879 to 1883. In the mid 1870s Burke visited Brittany where he stayed at the fashionable artist's colony of Pont aven. This inspired him to paint a number of landscape and peasant scenes which were admired in Ireland and encouraged a younger generation of Irish artists including Walter Osborne (q.v.) to follow his example and visit France. Bourke's repetoire of landscape and peasant genre reflected the pattern of his life and the places he visited and includes scenes from Holland, Ireland, England, Brittany and lastly Italy. He settled in Florence in 1889 and died there two years later.