Henry Jones Thaddeus
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Henry Jones Thaddeus (1859 – 1929) was a realist and portrait painter born and trained in County Cork, Ireland.
Born Henry Thaddeus Jones, he entered the Cork School of Art when he was only ten years old. He won the Taylor Prize in 1878 enabling him to go to London, and then again in 1879 enabling him to continue his studies in Paris at the Academie Julian. His first major painting (illustration, right) was hung "on the line" (at eye-level) at the Paris Salon of 1881, a major compliment.
Receiving two papal portrait commissions (for Pope Pius X) and being elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in recognition of his travels, he gained most of his earnings as a portrait artist for social elites around the world. Thus his autobiography was titled Recollections of a Court Painter; it was written in his retirement in California.
However, he was also responsible for a large corpus of other works, some of the most memorable of which stem from time spent in and around Brittany. While possibly not strictly impressionist (his work tending to adhere to the darker palette of Courbet, and the Realists), much of his work is evocative of the artistic centres of Northern France of the period.
His reputation, along with those of other mid- to late 19th century Irish painters, had fallen into deep oblivion when the art historian Julian Campbell became interested in them and assembled the ground-breaking "Irish Impressionists" exhibition in 1984 at the National Gallery of Ireland. Many of the artists exhibited, like Thaddeus, were not Impressionists.
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[edit] Further reading
- Brendan Rooney, 2003. Henry Jones Thaddeus (Peter Murray) ISBN 1-85182-692-0 Reviewed
