Artist best known for his battles with Academy

When the name Nathaniel Hone is mentioned, the very fine landscape artist who died in 1917 is usually recalled. However, his great-granduncle is also worth remembering, even if the older Hone spent considerably less time in Ireland than the younger.

Nathaniel Hone, the 18th century portraitist, was a founder member of the Royal Academy in 1768 and it is for his disputes with this institution and its president Sir Joshua Reynolds that he was most often recalled after his death.

But Hone was a fine artist and his battles with Reynolds were based as much on aesthetic as personal grounds. He was born in Dublin, the son of a merchant, in April 1718, but little is known of his early training. From soon after 1742, however, he was based in London where he quickly established a reputation for his ability as a painter of both full-size portraits in oil and enamel miniatures.

The latter enjoyed a renewed vogue during the middle decades of the 18th century which Hone was in an excellent position to exploit. But he was just as capable of producing much larger pictures, such as the dramatic portrait of Captain the Hon Robert Boyle Walsingham which was sold at Christie's in London last May for £245,750 sterling, a new record for the artist.

This wonderful picture, which hung for many years at Castletown House, Co Kildare is undoubtedly one of Hone's finest extant works and shows the captain standing before a view of the Canadian fortress of Louisbourg which he had helped to capture in 1758, two years before the work was painted.

The Christie's catalogue entry for the lot correctly stresses the importance of this commission, as the captain and his wife had already patronised Reynolds, with whom Hone was eventually to fall out. The precise reasons for the two artists' disagreement are unclear, although Professor Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin in their book on Irish painters suggest that the cause, at least in part, was Hone's passionate dislike of the Italianate trends so popular in the period, and Reynolds's open borrowings from Renaissance and Baroque sources. The joint authors stress that the Irish artist, on the other hand, looked for inspiration to Dutch masters such as Rembrandt, whose influence may be seen in Hone's series of self-portraits. However, as they also point out, classicism could not be ignored and in the background of the most famous of these self-portraits can be seen a view of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli.

Hone's most overt attack on Reynolds occurred in 1775 when he submitted his picture The Conjuror (now in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland) for exhibition at the Royal Academy; five years earlier, another painting, Francis Grose and Theophilus Forest as Capuchin Friars, had already caused difficulties for the artist. The Conjuror was a satire on the institution's first president through the inclusion of engravings used in his compositions and through the use of Reynolds's favourite model for the figure of the conjuror.

Angelica Kauffmann also believed that one of the nudes seen in the background bore a likeness to herself and insisted this form be painted out. Even so, the Academy refused to exhibit The Conjuror and so Hone chose instead to hold a one-man show of his work in central London featuring oil portraits and enamels as well as a number of landscapes and subject pictures.

Despite the problems with Reynolds, Hone continued to contribute to exhibitions at the Royal Academy up to the time of his death in 1782.

Because he worked hard throughout his career, examples of Hone's work still quite regularly appear at auction although they rarely make as much as did the portrait at Christie's. A smaller portrait by him of a woman and child, for instance, was sold by Sotheby's last May for £6,600 sterling.