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Daniel O’Neill (1920-1974)
The Gleaners
Oil on board, 35.5 x 53cm (14 x 21”)
Signed, inscribed verso
Provenance: From the Collection of George and Maura McClelland and on loan from them to IMMA from 1999 - 2004;
Private Collection Dublin
Exhibited :
Daniel O’Neil
Exhibition, Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin, May 1953 Cat. No. 22.;
Gerard Dillon, Art and Friendships,
Adam’s, Dublin July 2013,The Ava Gallery, Clandeboye
August 2013 Cat. No. 19
Literature :
Daniel O’Neill (1920 - 1974) : Landscape and Figure Painter,
by Gena Lynam, Irish Arts Review Vol 15, 1999
Illustrated p.136;
The Hunter Gatherer
, IMMA 2004 illustrated Fig.45 p.36.; and
“
Gerard Dillon, Art and Friendships
“ by Karen Reihill 2013 illustrated p.19
Dan O’Neill was one of 20th century Ulster’s most significant landscape and figure painters. He received little formal training
yet his works were very skilful and subtle in their tonal harmonies, painterly brushwork and use of impasto. He declared him-
self to have been interested in the work of the Italian primitives from the age of fifteen. However, his style was a contemporary
one and unique to him. Along with Gerard Dillon, George Campbell, Nevill Johnson and to a lesser extent Colin Middleton,
this group were collectively known as the Northern Painters.
In 1945 the Dublin Magazine commented: ‘His sensuous handling of paint, his rich colour and dramatic sense in composi-
tion, are used to express an individual vision which is essentially Romantic’. He had his first one man show at the Waddington
Gallery in Dublin in 1946 and visited Paris in 1949, turning a three week trip into almost six months, and there was able to
study and absorb the works of painters he admired including Watteau and Puvis de Chavanne. He later exhibited in London,
New York and Amsterdam and left Ireland for London in 1958.
When George McClelland met him in 1969, O’Neill was downhearted after several difficult years in London. McClelland
gave him a place to stay in Belfast and a studio, and he produced paintings for a ‘Recent Paintings Exhibition’ at the McClel-
land Galleries in 1970, his first major show in Ireland for 18 years. In these paintings he left behind the brooding intensity of
his earlier work in favour of the saturated colour of acrylic paint and simplified motifs.The exhibition was very successful and
encouraged O’Neill to continue on this path, which he did for the remainder of his rather short life.
The Irish Times review of 15th May 1953 referred to the “imaginative, often haunting, melancholic interaction between figure
and environment, mood and circumstance”. While bathed in a golden glow, the figures in
The Gleaners
embody this feeling
of melancholy, silhouetted against the landscape and described in the newspaper as ‘a means of painting light - hard, cold
brilliance of moonlight’. It references O’Neill’s awareness of other European paintings on the subject, primarily Jean-François
Millet’s
The Gleaners
(1857) and others by Pissarro, Seurat and van Gogh. The rich, warm colours of the fields and the figures’
clothes are accentuated by the effects of light picking out their contours, and the long lingering shadows suggest the end of
a day of hard work.
€20,000 - 30,000
