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Similar subject matter, though less rugged than in the canvases of Keating and O’Sullivan, is to be found in other paint-
ings acquired for Deepwell at this time: superb Connemara and Mayo landscapes by James Humbert Craig and the wild
Donegal coast as depicted by Frank McKelvey.
Jack Butler Yeats – Ireland’s most famous painter – is copiously represented at Deepwell with five pictures bought in the
short space of two years between 1942 and 1944. The large
Fair Day, Co. Mayo
(sold in these rooms: Important Irish Art
Sale, 28
th
September 2011, Lot 50 for an Irish record price of one million euro), painted in 1925, is the most impressive of
these, but the much smaller
A Dusty Rose
(Lot 74), exhibited at the Academy in 1940, is the most lyrical.
The enthusiasm for collecting which is exemplified by the group of Yeats’ paintings finds a parallel in the array of Roderic
O’Conors that are the central focus of the later period of collecting: seven pictures fervently acquired between 1978 and
1980. The artist, previously hardly known in Ireland and only ‘rediscovered’ at this time, is the most international of Ireland’s
painters. He worked all of his life in France and was a friend of Gauguin and other great masters of early 20
th
century
French painting. His fiery palette and powerful brushwork is at odds with most other pictures in the house but his paintings
elevate the stature of the collection and lend lustre to the work of his fellow Irish artists, whose work was acquired at this
period – Osborne, Kavanagh, O’Kelly and others – many of whom, like him, had trained and worked in Antwerp and Paris.
Roderic O’Conor’s studies of women and vibrant expressionist landscapes have a verve which jolts the visitor into the real-
isation that Deepwell is an important art collection. Now the landscapes of Hone (two of them purchased by John Reihill
Senior in 1943) – as fine as anything by the Barbizon painters – and works by Osborne, O’Kelly and Kavanagh appear in a
different light. These are as much a part of a European tradition as they are of an Irish one, and it was only because these
artists mastered this tradition that later painters like Keating, O’Sullivan, Craig and McKelvey – who paradoxically found a
home at Deepwell first – could confidently practice an art that in subject matter was so appealingly Irish.
The two strands of work are complementary and the ‘two’ collections at Deepwell – like the father and son who assembled
them – are complementary. And that is why the Reihill Collection seems so much at home in this most gracious of sur-
roundings.
Homan Potterton
