William John Hennessy

William John Hennessy painted quiet landscapes and gentle genre scenes, and he came to painting through the engraver’s block. He was a skilled wood engraver and illustrator, and his drawings appeared in editions of Tennyson, Longfellow and Whittier.

Born in Thomastown, County Kilkenny, he moved to New York as a boy in 1849 and was admitted to the National Academy of Design in 1854. In 1870 he left for London, then lived in Normandy from 1875 and later in Brighton and Sussex, where he died in 1917. The Royal Hibernian Academy showed eight of his paintings between 1879 and 1907, and he joined the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 1902.

His pictures, such as An Old Song and Flowers of May, are calm and carefully drawn, with soft daylight and figures at ease in the countryside.