56
But the painting easily transcends any academic conventions.!e &g-
ures are crisply drawn, and convincingly integrated into the open-air
setting, a characteristic of Osborne’s ‘plein-air’ pictures that distin-
guishes him from many of his contemporaries. Moreover, his atten-
tion to detail and his feeling for textures can be seen in the gentle fall
of light on the girl’s face, the texture of the granite well, with lichen
growing, the rough stone walls, small windows and thatched roof of
the cottage, and the garden wall where moss is spreading. !e farm-
yard had somewhat fallen into neglect. But wiry trees are in leaf, and
through the arched doorway a verdant cabbage patch can be seen.
!in cloud covers the blue sky. Such overcast days were favoured by
many ‘plein-airists’, allowing them to work in an even grey light, with
emphasis upon the tonal greys, grey-greens, browns and blue-greys.
But in Osborne’s painting the ochres, greens and silvers have a glow-
ing warmth, suggesting that the sunshine is going to break through.
Nathaniel Hill’s smaller painting
Goose Girl in a Breton Farmyard,
1884 (Crawford Gallery, Cork) focuses on the right-hand side of the
yard, but takes an identical view of the wall, and doorway behind.
He represents a girl in white bonnet and apron crouching to feed a
%ock of young geese. His careful realistic style is almost identical to
that of Osborne, although the &gure and birds are more generalised
in treatment.
Osborne may have regarded
A Grey Morning in a Breton Farmyard
as
a companion piece to
Apple Gathering, Quimperlé
(N.G.I.), the for-
mer being painted at Pont-Aven in summer, the latter at Quimperlé
in autumn; and both pictures being exhibited at the R.H.A., and at
the Irish section of the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition the following
year.
A Grey Morning
was loaned to the Walter Osborne Memorial Exhi-
bition in Dublin in 1903, the year of the artist’s untimely death. A
small pencil drawing of Osborne’s painting is included in the artist’s
sketchbook (NGI no. 19,201, facing p.3,[i])
A Grey Morning in a Breton Farmyard
catches a real sense of rustic life
that engages our attention. Osborne combines qualities of intensity
of observation with detachment, naturalism with a)ection for his hu-
man subject-matter, that became characteristic aspects of his painting
throughout his career.
Dr. Julian Campbell
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