92 / 196
92
69
Walter Frederick Osborne RHA ROI (1859-1903)
Ploughing (c1887/1888)
Oil on board, 31 x 39cm (12¼ x 15½”)
Signed
Provenance: Collection John Leo Burke, Dublin
Exhibited: ‘Walter Osborne’, Exhibition National Gallery of Ireland, 1983, no.32; Important Irish
Art Sale, these rooms,5/12/2001, lot 57, where purchased by current owner.
Literature: Jeanne Sheehy “Walter Osborne”, Ballycotton 1974, no.54;
Jeanne Sheehy “Walter Osborne” National Gallery of Ireland 1983, no.32, p.84, illustrated
Working in England in the late 1880s Osborne painted a series of relatively small landscapes
of the flat rural countryside.These often included people at work: harvesting, ploughing, tend-
ing cattle or sheep, lifting potatoes or turnips. ‘Ploughing’ is typical of this group of pictures.
Osborne skilfully represents the pastoral scene: the man with massive cart horses ploughing,
seagulls rising behind them, and the boy and dog minding a flock of sheep in the background.
Here as in other such landscapes, the horizon line which divides the land from the sky is
drawn exactly mid-way across the picture. There is harmony in the use of colour: pleasant
mauves, browns and greens in the ploughed earth, and an attractive duck-egg blue in the sky,
with streaks of blue on the horizon.The earth in the foreground, and the clouds in the sky, are
enlivened by broad brushstrokes.
Julian Campbell
€40,000 - 60,000