THOMAS HICKEY (DUBLIN 1741-1824 CHENNAI)
Portrait of Sebastian Holford Greig (1780-1820)
oil on canvas
signed and dated, Thomas Hickey (Madras)... / 1820 (reverse, lower centre) and S.H.G. (reverse, strechter bar)
77 x 58.7 cm (30 1/4 x 23 1/7 in)
framed

PROVENANCE
Estate of Sebastian Holford Greig (1780-1820);
By descent to his great-grandson Lieutenant Colonel Henry Trevelyan (1881- 1971) and thence by descent to the present owner.

Sometime in 1820, in Madras, India, the nearly eighty-year-old Irish artist, Thomas Hickey (1741–1824), painted the portrait of Sebastian Holford Greig (1780-1820), a young Scottish magistrate. Hickey, who had trained in Dublin and London, traveled East, was attacked and captured by Spanish and French ships, escaped to live in Lisbon for several years and finally arrived in India where he settled in 1798. There he established a reputation as a portraitist of the Scottish military, officers of the East India Company, British surveyors, and civil servants. The portrait exhibits Hickey’s characteristic delicate handling of fabric in the white cravat and navy frock, and can be seen as a key example of Anglo-Indian history and its complex web of relations across the seas.