Philip Hamerton was born at Laneside, a hamlet near Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, England. His mother died giving birth to him, and his father died ten years later. When he was about five, he was sent to live with his two aunts at an estate called the Hollins on the edge of Burnley, where he attended Burnley Grammar School.Hamerton's first literary attempt, a volume of poems, was unsuccessful, leading him to devote himself for a time entirely to landscape painting; he camped out in the Scottish Highlands, where he eventually rented the former island of Inistrynich in Loch Awe, upon which he settled with his wife Eugénie Gindriez, the daughter of a French republican magistrate, in 1858. Discovering after a time that he was more suited to art criticism than painting, he moved to his wife's native area in France, [where?] where he produced his Painter's Camp in the Highlands (1863), which was very successful and prepared the way for his standard work on Etching and Etchers (1866). In the following year he published Contemporary French Painters, and in 1868 a continuation, Painting in France after the Decline of Classicism.