Henry Nelson O'Neil, A.R.A. 1817-1880

The painter Henry Nelson O’Neil is best remembered for his two spectacular subjects inspired by the Indian Mutiny, Eastward Ho! August 1857 and Home Again, shown at the Royal Academy in 1858 and 1859 respectively. Ever since the first uprising of Indian sepoys against the administration of the East India Company in the late summer of 1857, a frenzy of outraged patriotism had overtaken British public opinion. This was fed by terrifying accounts in newspapers and magazines of the massacre of English men, women and children, and the savage reprisals against the rebels, in the course of bitter fighting around Delhi, Cownpore and Lucknow.

O’Neil was one of a number of paonters who took subjects connected with contemporary events in India. Amongst works shown in 1858 were Abraham Solomon’s The Flight, Frederick Goodall’s The Campbells are Coming: Lucknow September 1857, and Noel Paton’s In Memoriam, each of which was set in India. However, O’Neil’s 1858 exhibit Eastward Ho! proved the most popular of all the images inspired by the Mutiny. The placing of the action in Gravesend, the point of embarkation for British troops destined for the war, must have made it seem familiar and comprehensible to a London audience, and the subtle manipulation of a range of responses on the part of the departing soldiers and their families engaged the sympathies of visitors to the Royal Academy, fond as that public was for sentimental narrative. The second painting, Home Again, showing the battle-worn soldiers returning, provides the perfect counterpart to the first, both in the way it concludes the historical narrative, and in terms of its asymmetry of composition, which mirrors the pattern of the first subject. If it was received with less enthusiasm at the Royal Academy in 1859, this was perhaps because the excitement and fear that the Indian Mutiny had previously inspired was by then abating (although in fact the uprising was not finally crushed until that same summer). Even so, the mezzotints after the two subjects which William Tuner Davey produced in 1860 and 1861 were commercially successful, and when in 1862 the first of the two subjects was seen at the London International Exhibition it was seized upon as among the finest of the works shown by living artists.

It seems that both the prime versions of the two subjects found ready buyers. Eastward Ho! was acquired by Edward Adam Leatham MP, either directly from the Royal Academy or at least by the time the engraving was published. Home Again seems also to have been bought from the artist soon after its first exhibition, and was subsequently in the collection of Major William Spowers. O’Neil painted several replicas and variants of both pictures. Of the present version, Home Again, the prime version appears to be that sold by Christie’s 23 June 1989, lot 145a, now in a private collection in England. A reduced replica – perhaps made as the basis for W. T. Davey’s engraving – was sold at Christie’s, 20 June 1986, lot 69, and is now in the National Army Museum. Smaller versions on panel of both subjects were formerly in the McCormick collection (see Susan Casteras, The Edmund J. and Suzanne McCormick Collection, Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, 1984, nos. 26 and 27), while the Forbes Magazine collection possesses a pair of reworked figures from each of the original compositions (see Christopher Forbes, The Royal Academy Revisited, New York, 1975, no. 50).