While most of Nathaniel Hone’s landscapes and seascapes, painted around Malahide and Portmarnock, depict calm weather, with cattle grazing contentedly beneath blue skies and cumulus clouds, when he travelled to the West of Ireland, beginning in 1890, he responded to the energy and force of the wild Atlantic Ocean. In this dramatic painting, waves billow and break onto green surging waters, beneath a dark ledge of rock. In its simplicity and direct approach to the subject, this canvas can be compared to Gustave Courbet’s series of wave paintings, which date from around twenty years earlier and with which Hone would almost certainly have been familiar, as he was living in Paris during that time. In his own turbulent seascapes, painted two decades later, Hone emulates Courbet, preferring the darker, more brooding, colour range of the Realists, and eschewing the lighter palette of the Impressionists. Nature is depicted as being unforgiving and unrelenting, a harsh and unforgiving environment for mankind. Hone was a keen yachtsman in his youth, and so, like Winslow Homer, had developed an understanding of the sea through direct observation and experience. St. George’s Head, Kilkee is one of a series he painted, depicting the rocky coastline of the West of Ireland. He first visited Kilkee and the Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare in 1890, and continued to visit and paint the rugged cliffs and sea for many years. He exhibited Near Kilkee at the RHA in 1891, followed by many seascapes, up until Clare Coast in 1912, and Rough Sea in 1913.

Peter Murray