Seán O’Sullivan RHA
1906-1964

Connemara Woman
with Red Skirt
1952

Oil on board
16 x 12.6 in

Provenance: Dawson Gallery, Dublin

The painter and printmaker, Seán O’Sullivan was born in Dublin in 1906. He studied drawing at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where his teacher, Seán Keating, became a life-long friend and supporter. He won a scholarship to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, where he met his wife, the artist, Rene Mouw.  Together they went to Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi (where Eileen Gray studied) and at the Académie de La Grande Chaumière in Paris (where Nano Reid studied). These schools were less hidebound than the École des Beaux Arts – Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder and Tamara de Lempicka, for example, also studied at La Grande Chaumière.

He exhibited aver 200 works at the Royal Hibernian Academy.  He also showed at the Oireachtas exhibitions from 1942 onwards, and at the Victor Waddington Gallery, Dublin, and the Helen Hackett Gallery,
New York.

His portraits exude visual vibrancy and are animated and natural.

Niall Bruton
b. 1963

The Famine Family
1999

Bronze
9.5 x 5 x 4 in

Between 1847 and 1856, more than 30,000 people emigrated from the port of Sligo. In 1997, the Sligo Famine Committee commissioned a memorial to commemorate that exodus. It bears the words of the poet, W.B. Yeats: “The dead are not far from us, they cling in some strange way to what is most still and deep within us.”

In this piece, Bruton addresses the anguish of a family who may have buried a child in the nearby graveyard; he counters the depression of the mother and father with the excitement of the child, who is pointing enthusiastically to the ship coming into port, which will take them to the new world.

Jack Butler Yeats
1871−1957

A Young Man’s Troubles
1900

Watercolor, pastel and
pencil on paper
6 x 18 in

Exhibited: “Sketches of Life in The West of Ireland,” Leinster Hall, Dublin, March 1900; Clarendon Hotel, Oxford, October 1900, Walker Art Gallery, London, February 1901; Clausen Galleries, New York, March 31–April 16, 1904. Literature: All Ireland Review, March 10, 1900; Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats: His Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels, Dublin 1993.

This work by Ireland’s preeminent artist was described in the All Ireland Review as depicting “a shop interior in a Connaught town; a sad-faced young man stands brooding at one side of a broad board or counter; behind him pasted on the wall are a row of emigration notices; in front of him, at the far side of the counter, two elderly men stand drinking, and they watch with kindly distant disinterest the working of his thoughts.” The man, head in his hands, can only be contemplating departure from home, as he stands surrounded by emigration posters.

Purchased by the art collector John Quinn, a great supporter of Modernism, the work was later sold as part of his collection, where it was listed in the inventory as The Bar.

Kieran Tuohy
b. 1953

Surplus People 
2010−2011

Bog oak on limestone bases
5 figures,
heights: 84, 80, 70, 54, 48 in

Tuohy’s works evoke a range of emotions associated with the Famine: hunger, terror, grief, helplessness, anger, loneliness, guilt and despair. This family is at the end of its tether; there is no food left; they are barely clothed, they have nowhere to live, no one to turn too, and by their isolation, it would appear as if they are almost beyond turning to each other—and yet we glimpse remnants of deep tenderness and humanity as the mother whispers her last words to her
dying baby.

They have not done this to themselves, they are surplus to requirements. Many landlords saw in the Famine the opportunity to curb the population; moreover by evicting tenants they could turn their land to greater profit by shifting to open grazing for cattle which could be sold to feed the growing industrial cities of Britain.

Bog oak is a primordial material, thousands of years old, steeped in folklore and history, and therein reside collective memories as much as traces of our ancestors.

Kieran Tuohy
b. 1953

Lonely Widow
2005

Bog oak
62 x 15 x 14 in

In the early 1990s, Tuohy used mahogany as his medium, and The Book of Kells as his inspiration, moving on to the more difficult medium of bog oak. Unlike many others, he makes the medium respond to his ideas, rather than letting it determine the figuration. He works with hard black oak, some 5,000 years old, formed from the forests that once covered Ireland. If each tree tells a story, none more so than those buried in bogs over thousands of years. Tuohy’s interest in Irish folklore and history is narrated through his use of oak and yew to tell stories of the distant mythic past, as much as recent histories, such as the Famine from which, he believes, Ireland has never fully recovered.

Kieran Tuohy
b. 1953

Thank you to the Choctaw
2005

Bog oak
52.5 x 12 x 9.5 in

Famine commemorations are rich in the symbolism of both giving and receiving. The Choctaw tribe—with its own long history, rich culture and troubled past—took the sufferings of an unconnected people, the Irish, onto themselves. Things were so bad in 1847 that this tribe raised and sent more than $170—a huge amount given their own needs—for the relief of famine in Ireland. Only 16 years before, President Andrew Jackson (whose parents were from Antrim) seized the fertile lands of the Choctaw in Georgia, and forced them to undertake the 500-mile trek to Oklahoma. Of the 21,000 who embarked on the Trail of Tears, more than half died from exposure, hunger and disease. The Choctaw saw the Irish as victims of cultural suppression, dispossession and exile. Tuohy parallels a totem pole style storytelling with the intricacies of a Celtic way of narrative.

The Palaeoecology Centre, Queens University Belfast, has dated this piece of oak as from 1705 BC to 1389 BC.

John Tenniel

Punch, ‘The Irish Vampire’
1885

Wood engraving

The chromolithograph in the background of Margaret Allen’s Bad News in Troubled Times (displayed on the other side of this wall) features the alluring figure of Erin about to be ravaged by a vulture—a metaphor for British occupation of Ireland. The iconographic origins of the chromo are Titian’s Rape of Europa, and John Tenniel wood engraving, contemporaneous with the painting.

In 1882, the National League was established in Dublin to promote Home Rule (and ultimately independence) provoking a series of cartoons in British publications intended to promote the continuation of British power in Ireland. Tenniel’s Irish Vampire shows Charles Stewart Parnell, the personification of the National League, transformed into a vampire bat, about to prey on beautiful Erin, the personification of Ireland. In the face of the evil from within, as Tenniel perceived the National League, attempts to liberate Ireland from her English protector are portrayed as monstrous. Contrastingly, in the Allen painting, the message is reversed, the bat is replaced by a vulture, a carrion-eating raptor (more deadly than the bat), and Britain becomes the predator.

Pádraic Reaney
b. 1952

The Last Visit 1

Oil on masonite
30 x 24 in

Here we see a family come to pay their last respects to their dead before they emigrate. Reaney was born and raised in Connemara, and has a studio in Moycullen, County Galway, where he lives and works. Given the severity of the Famine in the area, the scars on the landscape continue to be apparent to those who reside there. In this painting, the high horizon extends the visual narrative, reminding us that traces of the mass atrocity remain to this day located beneath the blood-red soil.

Pádraic Reaney
b. 1952

Departure

Oil on masonite
30 x 21 in

This family has been evicted, and now there is nothing left for them in their own country. They have lost so many that—walking single file and in silence through the night—they cannot avoid walking over the unmarked graves of their kith and kin. Homeless and hungry they face the treacherous sea crossing to America. The human suffering of the victims, rather than the politics of the Famine, form the subject matter. Given such a spectral image, it is not hard to understand how for so long memories were buried inexpressibly deep.

After William Henry Powell
1823–79

The Eviction:
A Scene from Life in Ireland

Lithograph
Printed and published by Robinson and Mooney, New York, 1871
21 x 26 in

“‘We owe no rent,’ a cottier cried; The Sheriff’s hirelings quick replied, ‘You owe no rent’ no not a pound—But the Earl wants space for his hunting ground.”

Evictions are emblematic of the Famine, and the ongoing British occupation of Ireland through the century. Here we see a group of tenants evicted from their homes by a British absentee landlord, who wants to use the land for hunting. A dying man, surrounded by his family and friends, is administered the last rites. In the background, further evictions take place. The image invokes loss, despair and anger: a mother holds her dead child; a soldier, returned from the Crimean War with one arm, comes home to find his duty thus rewarded; a mother and child hold back the man intent on revenge with a pitchfork…

The lithograph is accompanied by verses written by Mrs. O’Donovan Rossa. The Irish patriot, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was convicted for plotting the Fenian Rising in 1865, and sentenced to penal servitude for life for high treason. Released as part of the Fenian amnesty, he was exiled to America where he was responsible for the dynamiting campaign in London in the 1880s. His third wife, Mary Jane O’Donovan Rossa, took up the plight of Irish political prisoners in English jails, and toured America calling for their release.

Although attributed to Powell, an American History and portrait painter, there is no record of this work in his oeuvre.