Nathaniel Hone the Elder

Nathaniel Hone was born on 24 April 1718 in Dublin, the son of a Dublin based Dutch merchant. Little is documented about his formal training, but art historians have suggested, from stylistic evidence in his early pastels, that he studied under Robert West, who ran a private drawing academy in Dublin before the city's Society schools were established. That connection is probable rather than confirmed in the surviving record.

Hone married Mary, known as Molly, Earle in York in 1742 and went on to build a career in England as a portrait and miniature painter. He exhibited with the Society of Artists from 1760, showing works including The Brick-Dust Man, and he interrupted his London career to spend two years, 1750 to 1752, studying in Italy, including a period in Rome.

In 1768 Hone was one of the founder members of the newly established Royal Academy of Arts. Tensions with the Academy escalated in 1775 when it objected to his painting The Conjuror, which mocked Joshua Reynolds's reliance on old master compositions. Rather than accept the Academy's response, Hone organized his own independent exhibition in St Martin's Lane, London, gathering a career spanning selection of his portraits and miniatures. The Royal Academy's own history of the artist describes this 1775 show as possibly the first solo retrospective exhibition in British art.

Hone continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy's annual exhibitions from 1776 until his death. He died in London on 14 August 1784, at the age of sixty six.

Hone's standing rests less on a body of surviving contemporary critical writing, which is not reliably documented in verbatim form, than on the institutional record of his career. The Royal Academy's own account describes him as a celebrated Irish born founder member and frames the 1775 exhibition, staged in the wake of the Academy's rejection of The Conjuror, as possibly the first single artist retrospective exhibition in British art. That dispute with Reynolds, and the independent show it produced, remains the central episode through which historians read Hone's place in the founding generation of British art institutions.

Auction activity for Hone is thin and historically fragmented, consistent with an eighteenth century portraitist whose surviving work circulates mainly through UK and Irish estate and specialist sales rather than major international evening sales. The most fully documented public result available is Portrait of a Lady said to be Ann Gardiner (1746 to 1810), which sold for EUR 12,000 at Whyte's in Dublin on 9 March 2020. Collectors should also take care not to conflate this market with that of the unrelated nineteenth century Irish landscape painter Nathaniel Hone the Younger (1831 to 1917), whose results are tracked separately.

No catalogue raisonne has been identified for Hone, and verification of his work rests on museum provenance, exhibition history, and institutional holdings, such as those at the National Gallery of Ireland and the National Portrait Gallery in London, rather than a certificate program. Public auction data for the artist is sparse and often only partially visible across databases, so any single sale, including the EUR 12,000 Whyte's result cited here, should be treated as the best documented public data point rather than a confirmed all-time record. Because his name is frequently confused with the unrelated later painter Nathaniel Hone the Younger, collectors should confirm attribution and dating carefully before assuming that a given price or exhibition history belongs to this artist.