Adam's Important Irish Art September 26th 2018

94 81 ALOYSIUS O’KELLY (1853-1936) The Gate of Bab Zuwayla Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 52.5cm (30½ x 20½”) Signed and inscribed ‘Cairo’ From childhood, Aloysius O’Kelly lived and breathed a mixture of art and political sedition in Ireland, Britain, France, and the United States, as well as outposts of empire such as Sudan and Egypt. In 1883, he and his brother James were drawn into the vortex of violence surrounding the Mahdi in Sudan, James as war corre- spondent for the Daily News and Aloysius as illustrator for the Pictorial World. O’Kelly’s illustrations of the jihad in Sudan were part of a plan to thwart Britain in Ireland. By distracting Brit- ain overseas, they sought to destabilise the coloniser in Ireland. The conventions of Orientalism were problematic for O’Kelly, because he was bound by them aesthetically, but resistant politically. O’Kelly subverted the insidious representation of the East as exotic by rendering it ordinary. The Egyptian stereotype was of an unreasonable, superstitious, ignorant, indolent, sexually incon- tinent, deceitful and dirty people in need of civilising by their colonial masters (much like the Irish). Indeed, there are ethnographic continuities between O’Kelly’s North African and Irish paintings, as manifest in his Mass in a Connemara Cabin and The Harem Guard. This painting was executed in the mid 1880s. It shows the Bab Zuwayla gate in Cairo. 1 The old city was divided into quarters, separated by gates, manned by porters. On the left, the ever-present donkey and donkey-boy, and on the right, the watercarrier, pass through. While O’Kelly, and his master, the Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme, shared an interest in ethnographic realism, O’Kelly was clearly concerned with modern Cairo — as it was rather than as its colonial masters thought it was, or should be – a benign view of a stigma- tised setting. O’Kelly’s topographical competence is undeniable; the red and white coursed stone work, the deep shadows and bright sunlight attest to his skills as an enchanting urban portraitist. But Cairo in the 1880s was a tinder box, a source of great anxiety to the colonial authorities. The savage repression of the Egyptian nationalist movement had created massive social problems – the narrowness of the streets may have kept the inhabi- tants cool in the heat, but there were political consequences for a population packed together. This has the initial appearance of a highly finished painting, evident in the detailed treatment of the architec- ture, but on closer inspection the brushstrokes are looser, more vibrant and gestural than one associates with conventional Orientalist painting. Prof. Niamh O’Sullivan 1 . I am grateful to Prof. Bernard O’Kane at the American University in Cairo, for identifying the location. € 20,000 - 30,000