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NORAH MCGUINNESS HRHA (1901-1980)
The Seaside Park
Oil on board, 35 x 48cm (13½ x18½’’)
Signed and dated (19)’53
Exhibited: ‘’Summer Exhibition of Contemporary Irish Painting and Sculpture’’, July/August 1953,
the Victor Waddington Galleries, catalogue number 8
Norah McGuinness’s
A Seaside Park
is an elegant depiction of post-war Ireland. Seated on a
bench, a well-dressed woman gazes on an outlet of sea and a row of brightly painted Georgian
houses. The setting is thought to be the seaside park near Sandycove in Dublin. The painting
encapsulates the artist’s particular ability to unite nature and the modern cityscape in one
composition.
Having returned to Dublin after a brief but successful period in the United States in 1940, Mc-
Guinness produced many paintings of the city and of rural Irish towns. She lived in a flat in what
was then Bohemian Fitzwilliam Square and subsidised her income as an artist by designing the
window displays in the city’s most fashionable department store, Brown Thomas. She man-
aged to acquire a cottage in Co. Wicklow where she spent much of her spare time. This close
engagement with place informed her painting. She introduced stronger and brighter colours as
the work developed and as is evident in
A Seaside Park
. The vibrant hues of the houses and the
touches of strong greens that denote dappled sunlight on the shrubbery create a halo of warm
light in the centre of the composition. McGuinness had studied cubism as a young woman in
Paris with the painter André Lhote and it enabled her to produce modern stylized imagery with
ease. It is evident in this painting in the way in which the undulating forms of the trees in the
left-hand foreground are subtly offset by the simple curved shape of the streetlamp.
Some recognition of McGuinness’s distinctive use of modernist form was given to her when she
was selected to represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1950, just three years before this
work was painted.
A Seaside Park
was included in a major exhibition of Irish art organised by
Victor Waddington in the summer of 1953.
Dr. Roisin Kennedy November 2015
€ 7,000 - 10,000