Philip Gilbert Hamerton

[2] Hamerton's first literary attempt, a volume of poems, was unsuccessful, leading him to devote himself for a time entirely to landscape painting; he camped out in the Scottish Highlands, where he eventually rented the former island of Inistrynich in Loch Awe, upon which he settled with his wife Eugénie Gindriez, the daughter of a French republican magistrate, in 1858.

Discovering after a time that he was more suited to art criticism than painting, he moved to Sens and later to Autun,[3] where he produced his Painter's Camp in the Highlands (1863), which was very successful and prepared the way for his standard work on Etching and Etchers (1866).

He selected and wrote the accompanying text for Etchings by French and English Artists (London: Seeley, 1874) which included work by Alphonse Legros and Léon Gaucherel.

In 1891 he removed to Villa Clématis in the Parc des Princes, district of Boulogne-Billancourt in the southwest suburbs of Paris.

He died there suddenly on 4 November 1896, aged sixty, occupied to the last with his labours on The Portfolio and other writings on art.