(b Dublin, 1797; d London, 2 Jan 1868). Painter and printmaker. Dispossessed of his family estate, he left Ireland for London in 1821. He studied with the Italian landscape painter Gaspar Gabrielli ( fl 1803-33) at the Royal Dublin Society's schools and with the miniature painter John Comerford (c. 1770-1832). He then spent nearly a decade experimenting with portraiture, first in oils and then in lithographs. The ease and economy of the latter, a relatively new medium, loosened Doyle's line, and from 1829 to 1851 he produced a series of 917 prints satirizing the public face of English politics. For these prints he adopted the cipher 'H. B.' (from two 'J. D.'s, one on top of the other). From the Catholic Relief Bill until the Ecclesiastical Title Act, H. B.'s prints caused London 'to smile in a quiet, gentlemanlike kind of way' (according to William Makepeace Thackeray) at faintly animalized depictions of Arthur, Duke of Wellington, Prime Ministers Disraeli, Palmerston and Melbourne, and the ubiquitous John Bull (or, as H. B. had it, 'The man wot is easily led by the nose').
Part of the Doyle family
See the Abbreviations for further details.
