Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 29 MAY 2024

84 56 NATHANIEL HONE RHA (1831 - 1917) Yachts in Dublin Bay Oil on canvas laid down 34 x 52 cm (131 x 201”) Signed with initials Provenance: Acquired from the artist by Sir Robert Henry Woods (1865-1938) and thence by descent; On reverse a label of Daniel Egan, 26 Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin €8,000 – 12,000 Nathaniel Hone painted the sea in all its varied conditions with greater skill and understanding than perhaps any Irish artist. His deep knowledge of the sea was based on first-hand experience. As Julian Campbell notes, he came from a keen yachting family and ‘developed an interest in all kinds of boats and sailing vessels’ – including, as here, distant yachts – and some of his most appealing works are his relatively rare pure seascapes, especially a group painted in Dublin Bay and in the West of Ireland in the late 1880s and ‘early ‘90s. In his ‘wave paintings’ the traditional focus of maritime painting, the depiction of shipping, is relegated to distant specs on the horizon. The influence of John Constable and Gustave Courbert is clear and specifically the latter’s The Wave (La vague) exhibited at the Salon in 1870 and acquired by the Louvre eight years later, and a group of associated works. Campbell writes: ‘although his paintings lack the frozen rock-like weight of Courbert’s seas and leaden skies, and the heavy symbolic quality, Hone’s wave paintings are also expressive of the artist’s feelings in the face of elemental nature’ (Julian Campbell, in Nathaniel Hone , NGI, catalogue, 1991, 57). Hone had also looked at the seascapes by James Abbott McNeill Whistler and the work of Impressionist artists such as Claude Monet, but, as so often, he deploys lessons learnt on the continent to create recognisably Irish imagery. Closely compara- ble and contemporaneous works include A North-East Breeze , showing Ireland’s Eye from Portmarnock (Private collection) and Coast of County Clare (Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane).