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21 DERMOD O’BRIEN PRHA (1865-1945)Heading the Stooks (1923)
Oil on canvas, 75 x 101cm (29½ x 39¾’’)
Signed
Provenance: The artist’s son, Dr. & Mrs. Brendan O’Brien, thence by descent, then sold de Vere’s, Dublin, 25 November 2003, Catalogue No.23, where
purchased by present owners.
Heading the Stooks
was placed on loan by the O’Brien family to the Irish Agricultural Wholesale Society, of which Dermod O’Brien was for a time Vice
President.
Exhibited: Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 1913, Catalogue No.1;
Royal Scottish Academy, 1915;
Boston, Massachusetts (label verso);
Cork ROSC ,
Irish Art 1900-1950
, December 1975/ January 1976, Catalogue No.102, where lent by the artist’s son Dr. Brendan O’Brien.
Dermod O’Brien was one of the foremost painters in Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also the longest serving President of the Royal
Hibernian Academy, from 1910 until his death in 1945. His early landscapes, like
Sheep Shearing,
c.1901 (Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane), or
The Sand
Pit,
1908 (Pyms Gallery, London, and thence by descent), were mostly painted at Cahirmoyle, and have a formality, a feeling of being ‘a set piece’, which con-
tinues in his work into the 1920s and beyond. Thereafter his canvases often became smaller in size with an increasing ease and spontaneity of execution
that reflects his innate love of the countryside. Indeed, writing to his stepmother many years earlier, while on a social visit to London, he commented that
all the ‘fizz’ of the city, as he put it, ‘isn’t worth a day in the country at this time of year’. Thomas MacGreevy clearly agreed with O’Brien (‘Fifty Years of Irish
Painting,’, Capuchin Annual, 1949, p.503) when he wrote that O’Brien was a landscape painter of ‘invariable accomplishment’ and as time goes on ‘it will be
realized that he had a peculiar gift for stamping the natural scene with some quality of Irishness that is not a matter of mere accessories such as boreens,
bawns, and thatched white-washed cabins, but of sensitivity to the unique clarity of the Irish atmosphere’.
At a time when portraiture was the object of most painters’ determination O’Brien-who of course painted numerous portraits-had a natural preference for
the landscape. The setting for
Heading the Stooks
is almost certainly the O’Brien family estate at Cahirmoyle in County Limerick, where the artist spent much
of his youth and where he lived with his wife on and off from 1914 until he sold the property, in 1919. The following year he settled in Dublin.
The composition in
Heading the Stooks
, as is usual with O’Brien, is taut, the paint having been applied with deliberation and careful consideration, nothing
being left to chance. Overall the emphasis in the scene is on the landscape and only later does one’s attention focus of the work going on.
Dr S.B. Kennedy
Dr S.B. Kennedy is presently researching the life and career of Dermod O’Brien and would be glad to hear from anyone who may have information about
the artist. He can be contacted through Adams.
Heading the Stooks
is included in Kennedy’s listing of O’Brien’s works.
€ 8,000 - 12,000