The painter Derek Hill, who died on July 30th aged 83, made such a significant contribution to art in Ireland that he was given honorary Irish citizenship in 1999. Best known as a portrait painter of the Establishment, he is regarded by some as the best painter of the Irish landscape since Jack B. Yeats.
He became a painter almost by accident, and his deep involvement with Ireland was also accidental. Derek Hill was born near Southampton to Lillian (nee Mercer), and Arthur, a wealthy businessman. He had two brothers, Anthony and John, who predeceased him.
Public school (Marlborough) seemed the inevitable prelude to an upper-class existence, until at 16, he persuaded his parents to let him leave school and study stage design in Munich and then in Vienna.
While still only 19, he travelled to Russia to continue his studies in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev.
It was a chance meeting in Paris with Edward Molyneux, the couturier, that led him away from design to painting - and at that stage his future seemed to be exclusively in portraiture.
After the second World War, to which he was a conscientious objector, he spent a year painting in the west of Ireland which laid the foundation of his love-affair with this country but his next few years were to be dominated by Italian experiences, as artistic director of the British School in Rome and as a disciple of the aged Bernard Berenson at his famous villa I Tatti. His portrait of Berenson and his mistress, Nicky Mariano, reading to him in bed, remains one of his finest. With Berenson's encouragement, he began to paint landscapes, which he increasingly considered to be his most important works, and the ones he hoped to be remembered by.
In 1954, encouraged by Henry McIlhenny of Glenveagh Castle, he bought the former rectory at Churchill in Co Donegal which he called St Columb's because St Columba was born nearby, and soon began the great series of landscapes, particularly of Tory Island, on which his reputation principally rests.
As Monk Gibbon wrote: "What is strange is that someone like Derek Hill a humanist with a keen love of social contacts should have discovered in one of the bleakest and most remote corners of Western Europe the seascape and landscape theme which many people consider has led him to complete artistic fulfilment."
Unlike most established portrait painters, his pictures display an infinite variety of treatments - among the most memorable are those of President Erskine Childers on a Tory Island tractor, Lord Mountbatten in a fisherman's jersey, Mariga Guinness in an amazing hat, Seamus Heaney and Anne Crookshank. This last was rejected by Trinity College Dublin and subsequently acquired for the National Gallery by Homan Potterton.
His portrait of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid in St Vincent's hospital is one of his best - perhaps because they became firm friends during the sittings. In his comment on the picture in Grey Gowrie's book Derek Hill: an Appreciation (1987), he remarked "Beneath his wellknown forbidding exterior I found a warm-hearted man of understanding and sympathy." Privately, he added "I painted him as a little old statue left out in the rain." He continued to take a sombre view of ecclesiastics - notably in his portraits of the Dean of Ferns and the Dean of St Patrick's - the latter being the last portrait he painted.
But his portraiture was not confined to "the great and the good" - among his finest studies are those of his Donegal gardener Eddie Moore and John Mangan, a wheelchair-bound Donegal farmer, which is now in the Municipal Gallery.
His appreciation of other artists' work was an admirable trait. He filled his house with their work and when he handed over St Columb's to the Irish State in 1981, it contained over 300 pictures by 20th century artists.
Perhaps finest of all was his part in bringing to birth and then maturity the remarkable school of Tory Island painting. He has been credited with introducing a visual dimension into a culture which until then was predominantly musical and oral.
But Derek Hill also pursued other interests which for many people would constitute an entire existence. He travelled throughout his life to the most unusual and inaccessible places - most memorably with Freya Stark in eastern Turkey which ended abruptly with his remark (which could equally have been hers) "an absolute hell to travel with".
In the 1930s he travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway to Japan and then on to Peking, Saigon and Bali. Against all advice, he insisted on visiting the Yemen in the 1980s. One dynamic behind many of his travels was a life-long interest in Islamic art and architecture which issued in several publications. He and the Prince of Wales shared in several trips to Mount Athos - that self governing peninsula in northern Greece which for a 1,000 years and more has been inhabited by Orthodox monks and on which no woman may even still set foot. The monasteries of Athos are of course treasure houses of Byzantine art but his portraits of the monks display an understanding of the spirituality at the heart of it all.
In contrast to all that, has there ever been a painter in modern times so much at home in palaces and stately homes across Europe? He painted Prince Charles twice and each autumn they went to paint together in France. He was a regular guest of the Queen Mother at Clarence House and at Sandringham - indeed his friends felt that the most distressing thing for him about his illness in recent months must have been the knowledge that he was missing out on all the celebrations of her 100th birthday.
Yet this was the same man who could live for weeks on end in a waterless hut on Tory Island and be accepted and admired by the islanders and be treated throughout Donegal as "one of their own". Part of the explanation lay in his total lack of deference on the one hand and of any hint of condescension on the other.
His work and enthusiasm for the Wexford Festival should not be forgotten - in the early years he lent very considerable financial support and an annual visit to the opera was a fixed point in his complicated diary. Yet another interest was gardening and at St Columb's he created a garden full of rare specimens and unusual planting.
To be a friend of Derek Hill (and there were troops of them) was always an invigorating experience and sometimes maddening. Yet the storms always blew over without a trace and few people could evoke such affection from such varieties of people.
Perhaps his character was best illustrated by his relationship over 35 years with his devoted housekeeper Gracie McDermot who, despite often being left exasperated by his capricious demands, served him adoringly into her eighties.
Derek Arthur Hill: born 1916; died, July 2000