During his apprenticeship he began to paint, and made a little money by drawing chalk-portraits, but he was twenty-three before he received any proper instruction.
After 1870 he painted, principally in Wicklow, Connemara, and Galway, a series of pictures of Lish life and character, humorous in figure and incident, and fresh in landscape setting.
But a year or two spent in Leith in childhood had left its impress on his mind, and it was as a painter of the sea and shipping that he was eventually best known.
[1] His first pictures of this kind hovered between the Dutch convention and the freer and higher pitched art of his own contemporaries and countrymen.
Gradually the influence of the latter prevailed, and in such pictures as 'Reading the War News' (1871), 'The Busy Clyde' (1880), and 'Knocking on the Harbour Walls' (1884) he attained a certain charm of silvery lighting, painting with considerable, if somewhat flimsy, dexterity.