Educated at the Model School and the Government School of Art, he was apprenticed as a signwriter. He contributed to an exhibition by the Belfast Ramblers' Sketching Club in 1888, and later studied in Paris, where he was influenced by the work of Caran d'Ache. In the mid to late 1890s he lived in Chelsea, London, where he made the acquaintance of Mark Twain. In 1896 he contributed illustrations to Pick-Me-Up and Mary Russell Mitford's County Stories.