Erskine Nicol first visited Ireland from his native Scotland in 1846, the beginning of a longstanding relationship with the country. Travelling through Ireland and especially Connemara, Nicol witnessed the outbreak of the great potato famine which devastated the over-populated West of Ireland causing the death of more than a million people within ten years, with another million forced to emigrate. The artist stayed in Ireland until 1851 when he returned to Scotland,.
Between 1850 and 1869 Ni
col exhibited over ninety Irish subjects at the Royal Scottish Academy and over twenty at the Academy in London. After his fourth visit the artist returned for some months every year until ill health prevented him from traveling. He is better remembered as a genre painter, but as a recorder of an Irish way of life he becomes historically important because there were few artists working in Ireland at that time, a country devastated initially by famine and later by mass evictions forcing mass emigration.
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