Portrait of an artist `ruined' by his talent

Two pictures of the same sitter by one of Ireland's most successful artists during the 18th century come up for sale at Christie's of London next week. Portraitist Hugh Douglas Hamilton's pastels of James Colyear Dawkins of Standlynch Park, Wiltshire, are included in a sale of British pictures on Thursday when they are expected to make £25,000£35,000 and £2,500£3,500 respectively. The differential between these two figures arises because one picture is a small bust-length portrait, while the other, much larger, pastel shows Dawkins reclining on a Roman sarcophagus. The son of a peruke-maker, Hamilton was born in Dublin around 1739 and became a pupil at the recently-established drawing school of the Dublin Society, where he studied under Robert West. For much of his life the artist worked in pastel, a particularly difficult medium, which enjoyed an enormous vogue during the 18th century.

Pastel was most often employed for portraiture, and, as Strickland notes in his Dictionary of Irish Artists, Hamilton's "little portraits, being faithful likenesses, full of expression and charm, quickly done and cheap, became the vogue, and the artist soon obtained a considerable practice." It would seem that Hamilton resented his popularity as a portraitist but felt constrained by financial necessity. In the Irish Arts Review (Volume One, Number Two), Fintan Cullen quotes the artist writing from Ireland to his friend the Italian sculptor Canova in 1802: "There is little evidence here of artistic talent and that that I have has been ruined by the endless portraits that I am forced to produce."

Of Hamilton's early pictures, Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin in The Painters of Ireland c1660-1920 say, "their charm impedes our criticism." Having already spent some years in London, in 1779 Hamilton seems to have travelled to Italy where he became one of the principal portraitists sought out by Grand Travellers of the period. It was during this period that he executed the two Dawkins pictures now being offered for sale.

The small oval portrait was probably done in Florence, while the full-length work, which is discussed by Crookshank and the Knight of Glin in the Irish Arts Review Volume 13, would seem to date from Hamilton's time in Rome and to depict the home of the art-loving Cardinal Alessandro Albani.

It was in Rome that Hamilton met both Canova and also the neo-classical sculptor John Flaxman; the latter, according to T.J. Mulvany writing in 1842, encouraged the artist to switch from pastel to paint and to attempt something other than portraiture.

Hamilton followed this advice; one of the first pictures he produced after returning to Ireland in 1791 was Cupid and Psyche, which is now in the National Gallery of Ireland. The gallery also owns a number of fine Hamilton portraits, including that of Colonel Richard Mansergh St George and the double portrait of Frederick Augustus Hervey, Bishop of Derry and Earl of Bristol, with his grand-daughter, Lady Caroline Crichton; Hervey and his family were among Hamilton's most consistent patrons. Curiously, another work recently seen in the National Gallery of Ireland also has connections with Hamilton. This is Canova's sculpture of Amorino, commissioned by banker John La Touche, whose portrait by Hamilton was executed in Rome in 1789. Back in Ireland, Hamilton acted on behalf of his friend Canova over the commission since there appears to have been some difficulty in securing payment. Failing health obliged Hugh Douglas Hamilton to abandon his profession in 1804, and for the last years of his life according to Strickland "he devoted himself to the study of chemistry, always a favourite subject with him". Hamilton died in his house on Lower Mount Street in Dublin in February 1808.