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DANIEL O’NEILL (1920 - 1974)
Carnival
Oil on board, 41 x 61cm (16¼ x 24”)
Signed, inscribed with title verso
Provenance: The Waddington Galleries label verso, where purchased by present owner
Exhibited: “Daniel O’Neill” 1955 Exhibition, The Waddington Galleries, cat No.23.
Exhibited at O’Neill’s final solo show at Waddington Galleries in Dublin in 1955, ‘
Carnival
’ is similar in
style to other works in the exhibition, ‘’
Dinner in the Garden, 1925’, ‘Rehearsal’
and
‘Chorus Girls
’ when the
artist was painting in an Impressionist style. It is highly likely that O’Neill visited the National Gallery
‘Jeu de Paume’ which housed Modern paintings, when he stayed in Paris in 1949. These series of
works represent a deliberate move away from the artist’s characteristic moody subjects of the 1940’s in
favour of small group or multi-figure compositions.
Carnivals normally occur during the week before Lent in Roman Catholic countries consisting of music,
dancing, processions and the use of masquerade. Carnivals were however, also held in Paris and the
renowned Paris Carnival snaked along Rue Saint Antoine till 1952 and consisted of the ‘Walk of Masks’.
It is not known if this image was inspired by an actual event or has been adopted from the artist’s
imagination. In another work ‘
Carnival
’, sold in these rooms (Lot 106 1st October 2014), O’Neill allows
light from the background to dramatically filter through the crowd to revellers wearing hats in the fore-
ground. Here O’Neill has chosen to employ a spotlight effect or ‘Tenebrism’ a technique in art favoured
by Tintoretto and Caravaggio to cause dramatic illumination in the composition. In a moonlit scene, a
single candle held by a masked figure adds drama to a group of eerily masked faces and to the left a
young girl marvels at the unfamiliar theatrical scene imbued with excitement.
Daniel O’Neill explained his passion for painting to fellow Belfast man Seamus Kelly, (‘Quidnunc’) a
columnist in the Irish Times following the success of one of his exhibitions at the Waddington galleries
‘I believe that to experiment, to make discoveries in technique and apply them, is the excitement of
painting.’ Above all else O’Neill enjoyed the discovery of something new and he continued to experi-
ment in the 1960’s with Polymer colours and painting techniques till his death in 1974.
Karen Reihill, November, 2015
€ 5,000 - 7,000