Patrick Hickey

Patrick Hickey was born in Bannu, India, now Pakistan. His father was a Colonel in the Indian Army, 1st Punjab Regiment. After attending Ampleforth College, Yorkshire, he moved to Dublin in 1948 to study architecture at UCD. After graduating he worked for the architect Michael Scott. In 1957, he won an Italian state scholarship and studied etching and lithography at the Scuola del Libro, Urbino. Hickey produced watercolours, etchings and lithographs, and showed a grasp for natural forms. His interest in Japanese painting is reflected in works like ‘Illustration to William Butler Yeats’, with its use of gold and silver.

In 1960, along with Leslie MacWeeney, Liam Miller, Elizabeth Rivers and Anne Yeats, he founded Graphic Studio Dublin in an Upper Mount Street basement. In 1965 the Italian Government held a competition to illustrate Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, and Hickey’s eighteen inferno etchings won second prize. In 1967, while living in Dublin, he designed stamps issued by the Department of Post and Telegraphs. He also taught part-time in the architecture department at UCD, and became head of painting at NCAD.

An authority on Irish delftware, he organized an exhibition of eighteenth-century pieces in Castletown House, Co. Kilkenny, as part of the 1971 Rosc exhibition programme. Bogland, Wicklow was his first exhibit, in 1972, at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Hickey's only exhibition held outside of Ireland was at the Purdhoe Gallery, London in 1974. In 1973 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Throughout the 1980’s, he exhibited at the Taylor Galleries, Dublin. A retrospective of his work was held at the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland in 1994, and later at the Graphic Studio Gallery. He was elected a member of Aosdána in 1981, and served on the board of the Kilkenny Design Workshops. He died at his home in Monkstown, Co. Dublin in 1998. In 2000, an exhibition dedicated to his landscape prints from the 1970s was held at the Graphic Studio Gallery.