Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 4 DECEMBER 2024

Important Irish Art | 4 December 2024 www.adams.ie 95 include the superb canvases Mediterranean Coastal Scene, Beaulieu near Nice (featured in an exhibition at The Gorry Gallery in 2023),² and the present painting Mediterranean Coastal Scene . The two pictures seem to have been painted at the same location but from different viewpoints, featuring headlands, palm trees, aloes, distant cliffs and blue sea. But in the present picture Hone takes an unusual approach to composition: rather than following a classical model of placing trees at one side or both sides of the fore- ground to frame the landscape, he places the palm trees, rocky bluff and aloes in centre left, allowing expanses of sky to be visible behind. There is another smaller painting of a Mediterranean Coastal Scene , in the National Gallery of Ireland (cat.no.1458), which features palm trees, aloes, blue sea and distant headland, but with a villa visible behind the trees. Hone was fascinated by aloe plants, with their sinuous, spiky leaves and striking blue- green, viridian colour. They form a focal point in several Mediterranean paintings, and are painted in broad, defined brushstrokes, casting dark shadows beneath them. The fronds of the palm trees are highlighted with more slender, golden strokes. The foreground is freely painted in the manner that Hone used in later landscapes. The straight horizon line of the sea halfway up the picture, with pinkish-gold cliffs in the distance, anchors the composition. Hone adopts a delicate, scuffed technique in the sky – fading from blue to pale blue to a pale pink-ochre above the horizon. Accustomed to the earthly and verdant tones and changeable skies of the Irish land- scape, the sunshine, colours, pinks, blues and golds, and radiant light of the Mediterra- nean allowed Hone to experience nature in a new, freer way. His coastal South of France landscapes anticipate the colourful, sunny watercolours and oils that he was later to paint in Greece and Egypt.³ Mediterranean Coastal Scene is not signed or initialled, (Hone rarely signed his canvases), so it is not known if it was exhibited at the RHA in Dublin during his lifetime. Julian Campbell, October 2024 Notes 1. See Jean-Paul Potron et Sylvie Amic, Paysage de Nice, Villefranche – Beaulieu du XVII ou XX siecles , Nice, 2000; and Patrick J. Murphy, An Art Lover’s Guide to the French Riviera , Letterfrack, 2016. 2. See J. Campbell, ‘ Nathaniel Hone, ‘Mediterranean Coastal Scene, Beaulieu, near Nice’ in Exhibition of 18TH– 20TH Century Irish Paintings, Gorry Gallery, 2023, p.16, cat.no.17. 3. For a detailed study of Hone’s Greek paintings, see Anna Stathaki, An Irish Artist in Greece. A Study of Nathaniel Hone the Younger’s artworks in Greece bet een 1891 a nd 1892 , MA dissertation, UCD, 2024.