Thomas Hickey

Thomas Hickey was an Irish portrait and genre painter born in Dublin in 1741, trained at the Royal Dublin Society schools under Robert West. His career was defined by restless travel: he worked in Bath, Lisbon, Bengal, and Madras, and even joined Lord Macartney's 1793 embassy to China as its official portrait artist. Shipwrecked en route to India by French and Spanish naval capture, he turned an accidental Lisbon stay into years of commissioned portraits before finally settling in the subcontinent.