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Walter Frederick Osborne RHA ROI (1859-1903)
Children in a Meadow
Oil on canvasboard, 17.7 x 26.5cm (7 x 10½”)
Signed and dated (18)93
Provenance: Acquired by the previous owners’ family directly from the artist and sold by them
at De Veres, 10th December 1996, Lot 34, where purchased by John P.
Reihill, Deepwell, Blackrock, Co. Dublin
This work which dates from 1893 shows Osborne as the supreme Irish plein-air naturalist
painter. It is thought to be near the coast in north county Dublin.
Walter Frederick Osborne was born in Dublin in 1859, the second son of the animal painter
William Osborne. His family lived in Castlewood Avenue, Rathmines and he may have
spent some time in his father’s studio before attending the Royal Hibernian Academy
Schools in Dublin. He also seems to have attended classes in the Metropolitan School of
Art. In 1881, he won the Taylor scholarship of £50 which enabled him to study abroad. He
arrived in Antwerp in 1881 with fellow Irish painters, Kavanagh and Hill and registered
as a pupil in Verlat’s “Natuur” class at the Academie Royale des Beaux Arts. An influential
teacher, Verlat was a genre and animal painter and perhaps it was because his father was an
animal painter that Osborne felt drawn to Verlat’s class.
Two years later, Osborne travelled to Brittany where he worked at Pont-Aven, at Dinan and
with Blandford Fletcher at Quimperlé. The plein-air style of painting associated with the
French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage was pervasive among the younger painters at this time.
Osborne left Brittany for England c.1884 and then worked in several small rural commu-
nities, painting landscapes and genre scenes: first at Walberswick, where Augustus Burke,
his teacher at the RHA Schools, had painted and then at Evesham with Edward Stott and
Nathaniel Hill where he developed a more lucid naturalism. During these years, Osborne
wavered between precise naturalism and the looser sketch-like handling of Whistler. His
subject matter also varied between scenes of rural life and coastal genre. Osborne remained
in England until 1892 and associated himself with the painters of the New English Art
Club, notably Stott, Fletcher, Brown and Steer.
While abroad he kept in contact with Dublin’s artistic community. He painted Dublin
scenes, became a full member of the RHA in 1886 and, in the same year, was one of the
founders of the Dublin Art Club. He taught in the Academy Schools, where one of his
most important pupils was William J. Leech, from the early 1890s until his death. Osborne’s
return to Dublin was prompted by the death of his sister Violet whose newly-born baby
was given into the care of Osborne’s aged parents. From this time he cultivated a portrait
practice and became very successful; he obtained international recognition when his
Mrs
Noel Guinness and her Daughter Margaret
received a bronze medal at the Exposition Uni-
verselle in 1900.
Concurrently, Osborne continued to paint garden scenes and interiors with children but by
this time the artist’s general manner of painting had begun to change. Influenced by the Im-
pressionists, especially Manet and Degas, in his later work his palette is more adventurous,
his brushwork looser, and his approach more painterly. In 1900 he was offered a Knight-
hood in recognition of his services to art and his distinction as a painter, but he refused. He
died of pneumonia in 1903 at the age of forty-three.
€8,000 - 12,000
