Irish & International Art 10th April 2017 : Click Lot Title for More info & Pictures.

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signed ‘N.Hone’ lower left
oil on canvas
40 x 62.75cm (16 x 24in)
3URYHQDQFH Important Irish Art, James Adams with Bonhams & Doyle, 9th December 1998 Lot 41;
Oriel Gallery, Dublin 2006;
Private Collection
([KLELWHG Possibly Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin 1906, no.92 entitled Road to Bourron; Foundations 1850-2006;
Oriel Gallery, Dublin: November - December 2006.
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Nathaniel Hone,The Road to Bourron; Important Irish Art, James Adams 1998 p.19;
Foundations 1850-2006, Oriel Gallery, 2006 p.10-11.
€5,000-7,000 (£4,347-6,086)
Born in Dublin in 1831, Nathaniel Hone studied Engineering at Trinity College Dublin, and worked as an engineer in the expansion
of the railways to the West of Ireland. But, suddenly deciding upon a change of career in his early twenties, he went to Paris to
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copying from Old Master paintings. However, Hone’s real love was landscape, and he was soon drawn to the artist’s colonies in the
Forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris, where French artists of the Barbizon School were painting farming and woodland scenes in
a realistic manner.
Bourron-Marlotte were two adjoining villages in the Seine-et-Marne region, on the southern edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau. In
the mid-nineteenth Century they began to attract a community of artists and writers, including the writer Henri Murger (author of
La View de la Boheme), the Goncourt brothers and the painters Theodore Rousseau, Jules Bretoin, Renoir and Sisley, the Bohemian
painter Pinkas and the Romanian Grigorescu and Nathaniel Hone from Ireland. He resided here for much of the1860’s, giving the
village of Marlotte as his address in the Salon catalogues of 1865 and 1868.
Hone seems to have visited Bourron-Marlotte as early as 1855, painting studies of the old church and of a shepherdess in an interior,
‘A Girl in a White Shawl’ 1857 (NGI cat. No. 1479) and he spent much of the period, c.1857 - 1870 here and in Barbizon painting
small studies from Nature and larger canvases such as ‘La Mare aux Fees’ (The Fairy Marsh). He met some of the Barbizon masters
and several of his Fontainebleau paintings were exhibited at the Paris Salon.
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from right to left, beneath a tree in full leaf, towards a farmhouse at the edge of the village of Bourron among trees. One quite dark-
toned picture on boardAn Old Road with Trees (NGI cat. No. 1518) shows the scene with cattle grazing in the grass. ASecond picture
on board also shows the subject, but is much more verdant and freshly painted. The present painting, on canvas, initially appears
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those of a girl, tending her two cows and a woman and child upon the track.
Compared to the more careful, detailed manner of landscape, as practiced in Ireland and England, Hone takes a more generalised
approach, painting in a bold, even rough manner in places, using broad, sweeping brushstrokes in the foreground and cursive strokes
in the tree to indicate a breezy day. He skilfully balances dark and light areas in the composition. For example a warm sunlight falls
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skilful treatment of the sky: gleaming white above the village, then overall a warm pinkish-mauve, with a bright white upper cloud
and with patches of blue showing through.
After his return to Ireland in c.1872 Hone painted the skies above his Irish Landscapes with particular breadth and sensitivity.
Indeed, the present painting has much in common in colour and breadth with his later Co. Dublin landscapes. One of Hone’s
‘Road to Bourron’ paintings was exhibited in the RHA in 1906. It is possible that the present picture was acquired by one of
Hone’s great patrons, Sir George Brooke.
Julian Campbell, March 2017