ADAM'S - Important Irish Art Auction - 31st May 2017 (Click Lot title for more images and to Place Bid)

Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 63.5cm (36 x 25’’)

Signed and dated 1905

Exhibited:

Re-orientations, Aloysius O’Kelly: Painting, Politics and Popular Culture,

Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art,

Dublin, 1999-2000, no 25.

Literature: Niamh O’Sullivan,

Re-orientations, Aloysius O’Kelly: Painting, Politics and Popular Culture,

Hugh Lane Gallery

of Modern Art, Dublin, 1999-2000; and Aloysius O’Kelly: Art, Nation, Empire, Field Day, 2010.

In the late nineteenth century, O’Kelly embraced increasingly naturalistic concerns, but this iridescent painting is

more modernist than usual from O’Kelly. The young girl is treated as an integrated element in the landscape, satu-

rated with hot colour. Nineteenth-century paintings of Bretons show women wearing distinctive white linen coiffes

and wide collars, dark skirts, waisted bodices, embroidered waistcoats, and heavy wooden sabots, but this modern

Mademoiselle is informal in her bare feet, and modern in her dress, showing the evolution of peasant life in Brittany

at the turn of the twentieth century.

Niamh O’Sullivan May 2017

€ 7,000 - 10,000