William John Hennessy was born in Ireland. He came to America in 1849 with his mother and brother a year following his father's fleeing their homeland after taking part in the unsuccessful Young Ireland Party uprising. The Hennessys settled in New York, and when young William came of age, he decided upon a career as an artist. At the age of 15, he enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where he learned to draw from the antique, and the following year he was granted admission to the Academy’s life-drawing class.
Hennessy first exhibited at the National Academy in 1857, starting a continuous run of appearances in their annuals that lasted until 1870, when he expatriated himself to Europe. During his time in America, Hennessy was principally known as a genre painter and prolific illustrator for such publications as Harper’s Weekly and a number of books, including illustrated works of William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Hennessy left the United States and settled in London, living there and in its environs variously for a few years, and summered in Normandy, where he ultimately established a permanent residence in 1875. In 1893, Hennessy returned to England, but continued to spend a good deal of his time in France. Though the bulk of his career was spent abroad, Hennessy maintained a lifelong identification as an American, and exhibited with other American expatriates in both the Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia, in 1876, and also occasionally sent works to the National Academy’s annual exhibitions.
Few works by Hennessy are known today. From what one can glean from the surviving works, early on in his career, Hennessy appears to have concentrated on genre scenes and Barbizon-influenced landscapes, while in the late 1870s he appears to have adopted an more aestheticized style derived from Whistler and the English Pre-Raphaelites. His later works, from the mid-1890s on, show the strong influence of Impressionism.
Works by Hennessy are in public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the National Academy of Design, New York; the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts; the Century Association, New York; and the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York.
(Biography provided by Hirschl & Adler)
