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Seán Keating PRHA HRA (1889-1978)
‘I Gave Him a Smoke’ (Circa 1922/3)
Oil on board, 92 x 77cm (36# x 30#”)
Signed
Provenance: !e Imperial Gallery of Art, London, 1929;
Sean Keating Retrospective
RHA Gallery, Dublin, Nov/Dec 1989 RHA cat. no.111
Literature: “Playboy of the Western World” by John Millington Synge (1927)
illustrated P65
Commissioned by the executors of the John Millington Synge Estate in 1922,
I
Gave Him a Smoke
is one of ten paintings made by Seán Keating to illustrate !e
Playboy of the Western World, published by George Allen and Unwin in 1927. !e
paintings feature students and friends from the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art,
and several actors from productions of the play at the Abbey!eatre. Notably, Keating
appears throughout the series as Old Mahon, the man who was supposedly killed by
his erstwhile son. !e story is well-known, and
I Gave Him a Smoke
refers to a point
in the play during which Old Mahon has, apparently, returned from the dead, and
is entertaining the Widow Quin with stories about his son’s cowardice and lack of
masculinity. He tells the Widow that Christy was so feeble that he would ‘get drunk
on the smell of a pint.’He goes on to say that his son’s stomach was so weak that when
he gave him three pulls from his pipe ‘...he was taken with contortions till I had to
send him in the ass-cart to the females’ nurse...’!e painting illustrates those lines; it
shows Keating, as Old Mahon, having a smoke from his clay pipe while his gormless
son writhes in anguish on the ground.!e ass-cart waits in the background, ready to
take Christy to the worst place imaginable for a man in those days - to the nurse who
dealt with girls and women - a dreadful comedown for the man hailed as a hero for
committing patricide.!e illustrated edition of Synge’s play, which was described as a
comedy in three acts, was published in an edition of one thousand copies.
I Gave Him
a Smoke
is reproduced on page 65.
Dr Éimear O’Connor HRHA
Research Associate
TRIARC-Irish Art Research Centre
TCD.
Éimear O’Connor’s book,
Seán Keating: Art, Politics and Building the Irish Nation
is
published by Irish Academic Press, and is available in paperback, hard back (limited
edition) and hard back slip cased (limited edition).
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