Born in Cork, the artist was originally called Henry Thaddeus Jones, but changed his name to Henry John Thaddeus when he took up portrait painting in the mid-1880s. Having entered the Cork School of Art at the early age of ten, he gravitated to Heatherley's in London (1879-80) before moving on to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1881 he exhibited The Wounded Poacher (National Gallery of Ireland), an ambitious essay in realism, at the Salon; and the same summer found him in Brittany, where he painted at Pont-Aven and Concarneau. This was five years before the arrival of Gauguin and a year or two before that of Thaddeus's fellow Irishman, Walter Osborne, but Stanhope Forbes and H.H. La Thangue were in Brittany at the time.

In 1882 Thaddeus returned to Paris, and then set out to study the Old Masters in Florence. There he met the Duke and Duchess of Teck, who introduced him to society and sat to him for portraits which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1884. He was soon established as a portrait painter with a smart international clientele which was to include Popes Leo XIII and Pius X, Abbas II, Khedive of Egypt, the Grand Duchess Olga, eldest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, members of the English aristocracy, and several rich Americans. All this involved extensive travels (he is recorded not only in Hamburg, Cannes, Monte Carlo, Rome, Naples, Corsica and Algiers, but in America and even Australia), and our picture was no doubt painted at some appropriate stop. It certainly dates from after 1884, the year in which he seems to have adopted the surname Thaddeus.

For further details of the artist's career, see his autobiography, Recollections of a Court Painter, 1912, and the catalogue of the exhibition The Irish Impressionists: Irish Artists in France and Belgium 1850-1914, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, and the Ulster Museum, Belfast, 1984-5, pp.61-2, 182-3.