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Seán Keating PRHA (1889-1977)
The Port Authority
Oil on canvas, 94 x 117cm (37 x 46”)
Signed
Provenance: Commissioned directly from the artist by J.P. Reihill Snr. c.1940/1 (Framing bill from Victor Waddington Galleries is dated 5/2/’41) and remained at
this home Deepwell, Blackrock, Co. Dublin
Exhibited: 1942 RHA Annual Exhibition Cat. No. 33 on loan from J.P. Reihill Snr.; 1989 RHA Gallery ‘’Seán Keating Retrospective’’ Cat. No. 85 Ireland her
People & Landscape,The AVA Gallery, Clandeboye, Summer 2012, cat. no. 23
Literature: Seán Keating, James White, RHA 1989 (illustrated)The Book of Aran, published by Tír Eolas, 1994, illustrated p276
€80,000 - 120,000
Seán Keating was born in Limerick city in 1889.The eldest of the seven chil-
dren of Joseph and Annie (née Hannon), Seán showed signs of artistic talent
while still in junior school. He entered the Limerick Municipal Technical
School of Science and Art in 1907 where he won many prizes for drawing
and painting in oil. In the summer of 1911 Keating won a Scholarship to
the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art to train as an artist and art teacher.
He was elected an Associate of the RHA in 1918 and a full or constituent
member in 1923. A life-long nationalist, early in his career Keating became
well-known for his portrayal of the heroes of the War of Independence. But
the Civil War made him change his mind about violence in the cause of na-
tionhood; he did not, for instance, paint images of ‘the Troubles’ in the 1970s.
Keating was elected President of the RHA in March 1950 after the death
of his friend and colleague James Sinton Sleator (PPRHA) in January that
year. He resigned his position in 1962 so that he would have time to com-
plete his last major mural commission which was installed on behalf of the
Irish Government in the International Labour Offices, Geneva. Keating was,
during his lifetime, a deliberately controversial figure, and is well-remem-
bered for his televised performance during the ROSC exhibition of 1972.
Although previously written into Irish art history as something of a bulwark
against modernism in Ireland, recent research has revealed the nature and
extent of his valuable contribution to the arts in Ireland and argues the case
for Keating as a painter of the modern. While Keating’s paintings of the
Aran Islands were and are perennially popular, from the 1930s onwards the
artist was not interested in portraying prettified images; his project was to
document contemporary history.The scene portrayed in
The Port Authority
is
one that was typical of the working and living conditions on the Aran Islands.
There are many examples of Irish paintings illustrating warm cottage interiors
with huge burning fires; but the turf that fed those homely fireplaces was not
indigenous to islands. It had to be brought in from the mainland. The local
waters were shallow, even in the small harbours; the heavy turf was off-loaded
a mile or two offshore into vessels that looked like currachs, but were larger
rowing boats called bád iomartha, a few of which are shown in
The Port Au-
thority
. It was then brought in to the local harbour and unloaded onto the
quay, an activity that provided a day’s work for several of the men resting in
the foreground of Keating’s painting. They stacked the turf along the upper
harbour walk, seen in the background, ready for collection by the locals. In
this case, one man has piled his share into wicker baskets known as creels,
which in turn, are carried by his donkey whose assured footing should
guarantee its safe arrival across the stone-covered and rough-hewn path-
ways that crisscross the island landscape. A day such as the one represent-
ed offered the local men a chance to talk, to do business, and to catch up
with news from the mainland.They were the ‘authorities’to which Keating
refers in his title; experts on the sea and carriers of the ancient rituals that
originated though sheer necessity and the human will to survive. Keating’s
acute observation of the weather conditions; the cloudy sky with rain in
the distance, and the turbulent undercurrent in the sea water is striking.
So too, his attention to detail in the individual portrayal of the men; some
leaning, others looking, one or two resting after a hard day’s work. Accord-
ing to the shadows, the sun is beginning to set, and the day’s work is just
about done. In the middle of the activity, a small puddle reflects the blue
sky above; there were no rain clouds over Inisheer that evening in the late
autumn of 1939.There is an atmosphere of authenticity to the scene that
would have been nearly impossible without the use of modern technology,
and which, in turn, makes
The Port Authority
an image that reflects the
upto-date socio-economic conditions in 1940. Robert Flaherty, the film
maker who lived and worked on the Aran Islands during the early 1930s
while making the well-known socio-documentary Man of Aran, was a
friend of Keating’s. It was Flaherty that introduced the artist to the world
of the cine camera, and Keating purchased his own in the mid-1930s. He
took it to the islands on several occasions over the following few years
and he used the footage taken in 1939 to compose a group of paintings in
1940 that he called his ‘Aran Series.’ One of those paintings was The Port
Authority, made as a private commission in 1940, and framed by Victor
Waddington in 1941. Having used the cine footage as a guide to the com-
position, Keating could not but help depict the reality of the scene he was
aiming to portray. Unloading the turf was both a tradition and a reality of
living on the islands, the veracity of which is clear in the painting. Yet, it is
also of significance that although the sea is murmuring but relatively calm,
and the rain is miles offshore, there are no fishing currachs to be seen in
the water. Nor are the nets or the expected accoutrements of the fishing
trade to been seen around the quay side.The reality was that the mackerel
market, crucial to the economy of the islands, collapsed in the 1930s; the
fishermen had little to do. In
The Port Authority
, along with many oth-
er of his pictures of Aran from the 1930s onwards, Keating painted, for
posterity, a truthful account of life on the islands; contemporary history
paintings, rather than beautified images of a folkloric past.
Dr Éimear O’Connor HRHA
