In the 1960s, Homan Potterton, who had been brought from the George Bernard Shaw Fund, Potterton bought up in rural County Meath, studied art history in Trinity College, Dublin where lectures by Anne Crookshank encouraged him towards his chosen career. At the same time, he made numerous friends in the Dublin art world whom he describes in a diary which reads like a social gazetteer of interesting people.

After leaving Trinity, he studied in Edinburgh, specialising in 17th- and 18th-century architecture. For a short time, he worked for Desmond Guinness at Leixlip Castle before joining the National Gallery in London as Assistant Keeper.