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Nathaniel Hone the Elder RA (1718-1784) Portrait of a Girl with a Cat (c. 1780) Oil on canvas, 49 x 50cm (19,25 x 19.75) Provenance: Exhibited at the Gorry Gallery Dublin, March 2005 Cat No. 13 Nathaniel Hone was born in Dublin, the son of a merchant descended from Dutch goldsmiths. In 1742 he married Molly Earle, an heiress, in York Minister. Nothing is known of his artistic training but he must have been apprenticed to an enamellist who would have taught him the difficult technique of painting portraits on enamel. From c.1740 until the 1760's he worked as an enamellist and miniaturist in watercolour on ivory. By 1748 Hone had moved to London. Hone occupies an important place in the history of Irish and English miniature portrait painting during the eighteenth century. From 1746 onwards, Hone succeeded Christian Friedrich Zincke (1683/5-1767) as the foremost enamel miniaturist of his day. Hone's naturalistic approach to painting miniature portraits owed much to William Hogarth (1697-1764) and to Thomas Hudson (1701-1779). These early miniatures anticipate his later development as an oil painter and portraitist. Hone's reputation is as an oil painter and founder member of the Royal Academy (1768). He exhibited at the R.A. up to the year of his death. However he was a difficult man and he was greatly irritated by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), the president of the R.A., whom he satirized in his painting ''The Conjuror'' (NGI). In 1775 Hone held the first one-man retrospective exhibition. Hone was greatly influenced by Dutch and Italian old master painting. He experimented with styles of painting and approaches to portraiture in self-portraits and portraits of his family. Hone painted 'fancy portraits' of children that unlike so many of his contemporaries show the sitter as a child rather than as a miniature adult. This painting ''Portrait of a Girl with a Cat'' relates to the portraits of '' A Young Girl with a Pomeranian Dog'' (Gorry Gallery: February 2003) and that of ''A Girl Holding a Cantaloupe Melon'' (Gorry Gallery: November 2003) which are part of a series of portraits Hone painted of his grandchildren. In this group of pictures painted during the 1760's and 1770's the sitters are set against a dark uncluttered background which focuses the eye on the sitter as Hone did in earlier portraits in miniature. In these oil portraits all of the children have slightly glazed expressions, bright fresh faces and pink lips. Hone captures the charm of the children and emphasizes this by introducing a favourite device such as a cat, dog, fox or rabbit. One of Nathaniel Hone's greatest contributions to art in the eighteenth century was his invention of this new type of picture during the 1760s, which was a combination of the 'fancy picture' with the portrait. This is exemplified in his numerous portraits of his children and grandchildren. His ''Portrait of a Boy Sketching'' (NGI) and ''David the Shepherd Boy'' (exhibited R.A. 1771) are portraits of his son Horace Hone ''A Piping Boy'' (NGI), ''A Boy Deliberating on His Drawing'' (Ulster Museum) and ''The Spartan Boy'' (exhibited R.A. 1775) are portraits of John Carnillus Hone. In ''The Spartan Boy'' the subject conceals a fox under his coat and suffers a mortal bite rather than give it up to their pursuers. These genre pictures were reworkings of the old master classical tradition of depicting pastoral imagery and allegorical figures from antiquity. The fact that they are also portraits, full of character and conveying the individuality of the sitters, gives great freshness to the work. Hone also painted similar portraits of his daughters and granddaughters. His elder daughter Lydia Hone (1760-1775) was the subject of a portrait in which she holds a white rabbit that she saved from a fox (engraved 1771). Dr. Paul Caffrey Note taken from The Gorry Gallery Catalogue, March 2005 with the kind permission of the author and Mr. & Mrs. James Gorry. Nathaniel Hone the Elder RA (1718-1784)