Thomas Hickey

Ireland·1741-1824

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. During the Fourth Mysore War he produced remarkable sketches of Tipu Sultan's family, drawn at Srirangapatna and Vellore between 1799 and 1801, some of which survive at Daria Daulat Bagh. Known as a charming conversationalist who put sitters at ease, Hickey died in Madras (Chennai) in 1824. His work is now held by institutions including the Tate, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and Royal Museums Greenwich.