Career
He worked primarily with historical and literary subjects, but his best-known paintings dealt with the Indian Mutiny. Eastward, Ho!, dated August 1857 but exhibited the following year, depicts the British troops embarking for India. A second painting, Home Again, (1859) shows the troops returning to England.
He also had popular successes with romantic scenes portraying the deaths of Mozart and Raphael, depicted as though mentally transported to heaven by their own religious art. In The Last Moments of Mozart the dying composer listens to singers performing part of his Requiem. The Last Moments of Raphael shows the painter contemplating the unseen figure of Christ in his Transfiguration.
Most of the Clique opposed the Pre-Raphaelites, but O'Neil was the most virulent in his condemnation of the movement, attacking them in both paintings and writings. These included his futuristic fantasy 2000 Years Hence, which portrayed Britain in the year 3967 as a frozen wasteland excavated by an archaeologist from New Zealand.
