signed with initials lower right
with another landscape by the artist on the reverse
oil on board
12 by 16 inches
Provenance:
Dawson Gallery, Dublin
Private collection, USA
Hamilton captures the gusty vitality of the famous port with her characteristic verve and freedom. Kinsale lies a dozen or so miles south-west of Cork: its current status as a popular holiday destination belies its place in history, since it witnessed crucial and bloody events in the Nine Years’ War, the English Civil War and was James II’s port of departure for France following the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
Letitia Hamilton was born in Dunboyne, Co. Meath and belonged to a generation of famous Irish women artists (her sister Eva was also a talented painter and she was a cousin of the watercolourist Rose Barton). It's perhaps because she's seen as something of a country-house amateur that she's under-rated, but this is far from the case: she trained under William Orpen at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and worked all over Europe, particularly in Italy.
She was most of all, though, a sympathetic and tireless painter of the Irish landscape, and exhibited over 200 paintings at the Royal Hibernian Academy (to which she was elected as a full member in 1943) over the course of her career. Some contemporary critics took issue with her work but Victor Waddington, whose eye for Irish painting was unrivalled and who showed painters such as Jack Yeats and Gerard Dillon, showed her work alongside theirs at his Dublin gallery. It is clear that her contemporaries took her much more seriously than we now remember, and her reputation is long overdue for a boost.
