CORK.- Born in 1759 into a family of silversmiths in Cork, Adam Buck trained as an artist from an early age. Subtle, refined and often saucy, his watercolour portraits depict the literary, theatrical, social and political stars of the Regency period. He was also alive to the political issues of his day, and several of his early sitters were members of the United Irishmen, including John Sheares. Among the celebrities he painted were the actor John Kemble, Mary Anne Clarke, mistress of Frederick, Duke of York, and John Burke, an enterprising publisher from Tipperary who founded Burke's Peerage. Adam Buck is described by Turtle Bunbury as a ‘maestro of the Georgian Miniature’. The exhibition brings to life scenes reminiscent of those described by Jane Austen in her novels Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.

An exhibition of work by Buck, organised by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, is being shown at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, in February and March of 2016. Presented to coincide with the publication of Peter Darvall's A Regency Buck - Adam Buck (1759-1833) the exhibition includes prints, paintings and other material associated with this delightful Cork artist. Works from the Crawford Art Gallery's collection are being shown alongside material from the National Gallery of Ireland, the Royal Collections, the Ashmolean, and many private collections.

While still in his early twenties, Buck moved to Dublin, followed later by his younger brother Frederick. Both had trained in Cork and Frederick also studied at the Dublin Society's Drawing Schools. In 1786, Adam was commissioned by Richard Edgeworth to paint a group portrait of his family, including his daughter, Maria, who was then working on her first novel. Nine years later, in 1795, Buck decided to move to London. His brother Frederick returned to Cork, where he pursued a successful career as a painter of miniature portraits, done in watercolour on small slips of ivory.

Settling in London, Buck found plenty of work and many of his drawings were reproduced as prints, including a series of aquatints illustrating Lawrence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. In 1799 his Tambourina (Crawford Art Gallery) was engraved, along with a matching work, Triangulina. Buck was himself an accomplished printmaker, and in 1811 brought out a prospectus for a book on Greek vases, although the book itself was never published. He maintained his links with Ireland: in 1802 he sent a portrait to the Hibernian Society of Artists exhibition, held at the Parliament House on College Green, Dublin.

Unlike Frederick, who concentrated on miniature portraits, Adam branched out into more complex compositions, incorporating Regency neo-classical furniture and interiors as settings for his refined and charming watercolours. Many of his portraits have a lock of real hair plaited and mounted behind glass on the reverse. As an artist, Buck did much to define the image of fashionable Regency society, and his portraits of women of the period in neo-classical settings illustrate perfectly the cultural milieu depicted in the novels of Jane Austen. He died in 1833, aged 74.