Paul Caffrey gives an account of Hugh Douglas Hamilton, Ireland’s leading portrait painter, and the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland in this, the bicentenary year of the artist’s death
Hugh Douglas Hamilton was the first Irish artist to have his self-portrait displayed in the Uffizi in Florence where it has hung in the Corridorio Vesariano in the Gallery of Artists’ self-portraits since it was bequeathed to the Uffizi by Maria Luisa Bourbon, Queen Regent of Tuscany in 1805. Hamilton has long been regarded as the most important Irish portrait painter of the ‘Golden Age’ of portraiture during the period 1760-1800. Hamilton is the most famous artist to have been a pupil at the Dublin Society Schools which had been established in the 1740s
