FINE ART: Ever since the National Gallery of Ireland organised a retrospective exhibition devoted to Nathaniel Hone 11 years ago, it might be thought there was little left to learn about this artist. Certainly, the common perception has been that Hone's oeuvre is thoroughly well-known, especially since the gallery was bequeathed an enormous body of work by the painter's widow; it possesses more than 200 of his oils and over 300 watercolours.
However, a show opening at the Gorry Gallery in Dublin next week is to display 81 oils and watercolours by Nathaniel Hone which have never before been seen in public. While this collection will not necessarily change opinions of Hone's talent, it will certainly enlighten and enchant anyone with interest either in this specific artist or in Irish art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Perhaps because he had a substantial private income, Hone was never especially driven by commercial concerns and sold a relatively small number of pictures during his long lifetime; when Thomas Bodkin published Four Irish Landscape Painters in 1920, three years after the painter's death, he claimed that probably no more than 100 Hone works had passed into private ownership. This helps to explain why the National Gallery bequest was so substantial.
However, it must also be understood that Hone was not sufficiently appreciated by his contemporaries. Hence the exhibition of his pictures and those of John B Yeats arranged on their behalf by Sarah Purser in 1901. Although Hone exhibited almost annually at the RHA from 1876 and became a full member of that institution, he was not as popular among contemporaries - or indeed critics - as some of his fellow artists. The Gorry Gallery catalogue, for example, quotes from an Irish Times review of 1884 in which Hone's pictures are described as being "all painted with a daring freedom which sometimes approaches very nearly the limits of artistic licence".
Of course, at that time the Barbizon school - which Hone greatly admired and from which he clearly drew inspiration - was widely considered the very limit of modernism, while Impressionism was scarcely known and certainly not generally appreciated. Some of the pictures included in the Gorry Gallery show suggest an impressionistic approach to landscape, but this is because they are plein-air works done on the spot and subsequently taken back to the artist's studio. If there is a shared characteristic between the pictures, it is probably this: that they reflect Hone's spontaneous and instinctive response to landscape in a wide variety of locations. Today, it is his later pictures of Malahide which receive the highest admiration but this collection shows just how widely he travelled throughout his life, with watercolours of the Dutch coast, Venice, Athens, France and Egypt.
What becomes clear is that Hone was constantly working, dashing off pictures throughout his career whether of a peasant woman in the Pyrenees or of a coastal village on Corfu. The oils tend to be more specifically in the nature of working studies, many of them explorations in the depiction of trees or landscape.
However, these are by no means throwaway sketches. Tellingly, Hone kept all such work back in his studio, which is why they have survived until now. Even if not as highly finished as the pictures exhibited during his life, they were prized by the artist and subsequently by his heirs which is why this cache has now appeared. Its appearance should only add to Hone's reputation which has steadily grown in recent decades.