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

Oil on canvas board, 61 x 76cm (24 x 30’’)

Signed

Provenance: Important Irish art Sale, these rooms, 27th May 1998, where purchased by current owner.

With a keen eye for the detail of the weather conditions, seen in the quiet clouds and, in the tranquil sea,

The Turf Quay, Aran

is an excellent example of the type painting for which the artist, Seán Keating, became very well-known from the mid-1930s

onwards. There was no turf on Aran; the fuel had to be collected from larger boats anchored off shore, a job that could

only be done when the weather at sea was suitably calm. Dealing with the turf was highly labour intensive. Once off loaded

from the local boats, it was piled into individual wicker baskets known as creels, which were then saddled to the backs of the

inhabitants, or donkeys, for transportation to local homesteads.

Taking advantage of the good weather, the turf boats in The Turf Quay, Aran, have returned from deeper seas. Local men

busily unload the turf onto the quayside, while both men and women gather around the piles ready to fill their creels, three

of which lie empty to the left of the image. Yet, rather than illustrating the chatter and clamour of the busy scene, Keating

kept his distance, and as a result, his viewers are encouraged to observe the contemplative, ritualized aspects of island life, in

which each member of the community is absorbed in the work at hand, and all are testament to the spiritual and social value

inherent in hard work and, in working together.

The Turf Quay, Aran

, is similar in composition and style to a series of paintings that the artist made from the mid-1930s to

the early 1940s, which, although observed from life, were composed using film footage as an aid memoir. Indeed, the view-

point that Keating adopts in

The Turf Quay, Aran

creates a cinematic atmosphere, reminding the twenty-first century viewer

of the artist’s friendship with filmmaker, Robert Flaherty, which developed when the latter lived on the islands while filming

scenes for

Man of Aran

in the early 1930s.

Dr Éimear O’Connor HRHA

€ 40,000 - 60,000