Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/O'Neill, Hugh (1784-1824)

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1428430Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 42 — O'Neill, Hugh (1784-1824)1895Bertha Porter

O'NEILL, HUGH (1784–1824), architectural draughtsman, son of an architect who designed a portion of Portland Place, was born in Bloomsbury on 20 April 1784. He spent the early part of his life at Oxford, where he taught drawing, and afterwards resided in Bath, Edinburgh, and Bristol. Of Bristol alone he made over five hundred drawings. The originals he usually worked up and retained, disposing only of copies. Six sketches by him of the ruins of the fire at Christ Church, Oxford (3 March 1809), were engraved by W. Crotch, and published, with descriptive letterpress, at Oxford in 1809. Five drawings of Oxford and its vicinity were engraved by Skelton for his ‘Oxonia Antiqua Restaurata’ (vol. ii. plates 109, 110, 116, 117, 119). Drawings of St. Peter's Church and of Balliol, Magdalen, Exeter, and All Souls Colleges (engraved by Basire and Storer) were published in the ‘Oxford Almanacks’ for 1809, 1810, 1812, 1813, and 1828. Several of his drawings were engraved by Skelton for his ‘Antiquities of Bristol’ (Oxford, 1820, 1826). In the print-room of the British Museum are fifteen of O'Neill's drawings in pencil and water-colour, and in the South Kensington Museum there are three. A lithograph by him of a large manor-house, with wings, is in vol. ii. of ‘Polyautography vel Lythography’ in the print-room, British Museum. He was possibly the H. Neill who exhibited drawings in the Royal Academy in 1800, 1802, 1803, and 1804. He made a fair collection of fossils, minerals, and other curiosities.

O'Neill died in poverty, in Princes Street, Bristol, on 7 April 1824.

[Redgrave's Dict. of Artists; Bryan's Dict. of Painters and Engravers (Graves); Cat. of the Library of the Royal Institute of British Architects; Gent. Mag. 1824, pt. i. p. 381; Farley's Bristol Journal, 10 April 1824.]

B. P.