Irish Portrait Painters: From Hugh Douglas Hamilton to Orpen
The Irish portrait painters worth knowing run from the Dublin pastellist Hugh Douglas Hamilton in the eighteenth century to William Orpen, John Lavery, Sarah Purser and John Butler Yeats around 1900. Between them they left us the faces of the Irish Revival: the poets, patriots and patrons who shaped the country, caught by artists who knew them.
The eighteenth century: Hamilton and Hone
Hugh Douglas Hamilton, born in Dublin around 1739, made his name with small, finely finished portraits in pastel and later spent years working in Rome. Nathaniel Hone the Elder, born in Dublin in 1718, began as an enamel miniaturist and became a founding member of the Royal Academy in London. His best-known act was a quarrel: The Conjuror (1775) was widely read as a dig at Joshua Reynolds. Both men worked abroad because the market for portraits was in London, a pattern that holds for most of what follows. (Not to be confused with Nathaniel Hone the Younger, the landscape painter.)
Orpen and the Revival
William Orpen was a brilliant draughtsman who could flatter a sitter and chose, when it suited, not to. His 1904 portrait of Augusta, Lady Gregory shows her as she was: watchful, composed, a woman running a literary movement from a country house and a theatre in Dublin. It is one of the great Abbey-era likenesses and a natural print for a study or hallway. His life is told in our piece on William Orpen.
John Butler Yeats: the quick line
John Butler Yeats painted and drew the people around him, often in a single sitting, and he is the most affectionate portraitist on this list. His portrait of his son W.B. Yeats is a father's likeness of a poet before the legend settled on him, and his 1907 drawing of Maud Gonne gives the revolutionary and actress a searching, unglamorous attention. He left Ireland for New York in 1908 and never came back. More in John Butler Yeats: the painter who could never finish and on his artist page.
The Maud Gonne McBride drawing is available as a canvas print, and writers and sitters from the same circle appear in the Irish literature and writers collection.
Sarah Purser and the portrait of Casement
Sarah Purser made her living as a portrait painter before she became Irish art's great organiser, founding the stained-glass workshop An Túr Gloine in 1903. Her portrait of Roger Casement hangs well beside other pictures of the revolutionary generation in the Irish historical prints collection. Read more in Sarah Purser: the woman who built Irish art's institutions.
Sarah Cecilia Harrison and Hugh Lane
Sarah Cecilia Harrison was a portraitist, a campaigner and the first woman elected to Dublin City Council. Her portrait of Sir Hugh Lane, painted as he directed the National Gallery of Ireland, shows the collector who founded what is now the Hugh Lane Gallery; Lane died on the Lusitania in 1915. Her artist page covers the rest of her career.
Lavery's portrait interiors
Belfast-born Sir John Lavery became one of the most sought-after society painters in Europe. By the late 1920s he had a signature genre, the portrait interior, in which wealthy sitters are shown at ease inside their own rooms. Mrs. Osler (1929) is a good example, and the pose and soft light suit a living room. The full story is in John Lavery: the Belfast orphan who painted the Treaty.
Hanging a portrait
Portraits reward eye-level hanging and a little space around them. A single likeness works in a hall or beside a desk; a pair of sitters from the same circle, say Lady Gregory and a Yeats, makes a quiet gallery wall. For more names to start with, see Famous Irish Artists: Who to Start With, or browse the full Irish art prints collection.