VISUAL ARTS:THE EXHIBITION Hugh Douglas Hamilton: A Life in Picturesat the National Gallery celebrates Hamilton's achievement as one of Ireland's finest portraitists. Hamilton, the son of a wig-maker, was born in Crow Street, Temple Bar, Dublin, in 1740 and attended the Dublin Society's Drawing School in George's Lane, which had been established by Robert West, writes Aidan Dunne.
Based on the rigorous French system, the school was highly regarded. An award-winning student, Hamilton was recognised as a fine draughtsman and by the late 1750s he was working as a portraitist, making small pastel portraits in an oval format. Once he had gained in confidence, his work had a real lightness to it but also a feeling of substance, and his tremendous facility for capturing a sympathetic likeness ensured that he was never short of work. For much of his life he was, if anything, overworked.
Early on, he was employed by the Huguenot cartographer John Rocque to produce a decorative frontispiece for a volume of manuscript estate maps for the Earl of Kildare. He may well have done further work with Rocque, and evidence of other endeavours emerged in 2002 when a cache of drawings illustrating Dublin street scenes was discovered in Australia. But portraiture was to remain at the heart of his artistic activity. Not only was he extremely good at it, he also seems to have been adept at building good, enduring relationships with his patrons. His involvement with the La Touche family, which lasted throughout his career, is a case in point. Several members of the family feature in the works on show, including the first portrait known to have been commissioned by them.
When Hamilton moved on to London around 1764, a logical career move for an Irish artist of the time, he had no trouble attracting a continuous stream of portrait commissions from members of the British royal family, making likenesses of George III and Queen Charlotte, and members of the nobility. In fact, he seems to have made a pastel of pretty much anyone who mattered, recording "contemporary fashionable life in all its complexity". So says Ruth Kenny in her catalogue essay, which elaborates on Hamilton's exceptional mastery of the fragile medium of pastel. Part of its attractiveness is the potential of capturing fleeting nuances of complexion and atmosphere offered to a skilled practitioner - and Hamilton was a brilliant practitioner.
Little is known of Mary, the woman Hamilton married towards the end of the 1760s. They had a daughter, Harriott, who grew up to be an accomplished young woman and herself became a painter. In 1778 the Hamiltons set off for Italy, where they spent most of the next 12 years or so. For much of the time Hamilton was engaged, as were many artists, with making pastel portraits of some of the innumerable English and Irish travellers doing the Grand Tour. But he embraced the ideals of neoclassicism, then in the ascendant, and he befriended the sculptor John Flaxman when he arrived in Italy. Flaxman encouraged him to work in oils, though the influence of neoclassicism can be seen even in his pastels.
Mary died in 1789 and Hamilton and his daughter moved to Dublin in 1792. It was a surprising move, and apparently prompted partly by his own ill health. However, he thrived professionally in Ireland and was in constant demand as a portrait painter. When, from 1804, he was unable to paint any longer, Harriott completed any works in progress. He died in 1808.
Our general familiarity with Hamilton is based on relatively few large-scale oil paintings and an extraordinarily large number of portrait pastels. One of his best, and best-known, larger oils is the double portrait featuring one of his most important patrons in Italy. Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry and Fourth Earl of Bristol, with his Granddaughter, Lady Caroline Crichton(c 1790), is a stagy but still extremely successful composition featuring the two positioned by an antique altar in the gardens of the Villa Borghese.
Somewhat racier is Cupid and Psyche in the Nuptial Bower(c 1792-1793). It has been a fixture in the National Gallery since 1956, and is doubtless familiar to even occasional visitors. The subject may have come from one of Hamilton's finest Italian works, a study of Canova in his studio with Henry Tresham and a plaster model of the sculptor's treatment of the same subject. Fintan Cullen has argued that the two central nude figures in Hamilton's ambitious painting are derived from a Pompeian fresco. A pen and ink drawing, acquired by the gallery in 2005, is a study close to the finished work.
The show's curator Ann Hodge suggests that another, similar drawing in an American collection, attributed to an Italian artist, may also be by Hamilton. Acclaimed on its first exhibition as "the most perfect picture ever produced in this country" Cupid and Psycheis perhaps not quite that, being a bit stilted and mundane, but it is an estimable painting. Whether it marks a decisive advance on the only subject painting he made in Italy is a moot point. That work, Diane and Endymion, is a painting of similar scale, and was drawn fairly directly, Fintan Cullen has shown, from bas-reliefs in the Capitoline Museum during Hamilton's first stay in Rome in the early 1880s. It is true that wherever he was, in Dublin, London, Rome or Florence, Hamilton didn't get much chance to develop his interest and expertise in such large-scale subject paintings because he was in huge demand as a portraitist.
Here a problem arises in terms of organising an exhibition of his work. While his standard pastel format is not quite miniature, it really is quite small and, despite the real vivacity and attractiveness of a great many of the individual portraits - some of which are stunning - there is inevitably a certain sameness to them when they are viewed en masse.
A Life in Picturesis cleverly designed to avoid any encroaching sense of monotony or repetition. It explores the considerable range that exists within the small pastels, but also incorporates a generous proportion of other works, several borrowed from other collections. These include some fine portraits in oil, including a subtle, sympathetic study of Richard Mansergh St George; of the ill-fated Arthur Wolfe and his grandnephew Richard Straubenzie Wolfe, who were reputedly dragged from their carriage close to Dublin Castle during the Emmet rebellion of 1803 and murdered with pikes; and of the barrister John Philpot Curran. The popular portrait of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, though, is posthumous and much more one-dimensional.
Hamilton's unusual triple portrait of Emma, Lady Hamilton as Three Muses, is a terrific, startling piece of work. It would be worth a visit to the gallery to see it alone, but this is a hugely rewarding show that should be seen, even if Emma weren't there at all.
• Hugh Douglas Hamilton (1740-1808): A Life in Pictures, 60 oils, pastels and drawings marking the bicentenary of the artist's death, Beit Wing, National Gallery of Ireland, Merrion Square West and Clare Street, until Feb 15
