Portrait of the artist

Samuel Lover, who was born in Dublin, was a musician, a composer and and a book illustrator as well as a fine painter. He is particularly well known as a painter of miniatures. He began to exhibit in the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1826 and between that year and 1835 contributed ninety-six landscapes, miniatures and drawings. Lover left Ireland in 1834 to try his fortune in London and later went to the United States and Canada in 1846, returning to London, where he remained for the rest of his life, in 1848. A full-length portrait of him, seated beside an easel, painted by James Harwood, is in the National Gallery of Ireland and a pencil self-portrait is also in the National Gallery of Ireland (see W. G. Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, II, Shannon, 1969, p. 28 and 14, pls. XXXVIII and XXXVII).