Adam's Important Irish Art 27th March 2019

100 98 TONY O’MALLEY HRHA (1913-2003) Death by Water, from ‘The Waste Land’ - The Sea Silence Oil on board, 122 x 61cm (48 x 24’’) Signed, inscribed and dated (19)’84 verso Although he was born in Callan, Co Kilkenny, in 1913, Tony O’Malley always regarded himself as being from, and belonging to, two places: the Norman domain that incorporated Callan, his mother’s territory, and the “old Gaelic” world of Clare Island, his father’s family home. One of the most celebrated Irish artists of the 20th century, O’Malley was a modest, self-taught, quietly indus- trious painter. When he was 19, he went to work for the then Munster & Leinster Bank. Around 1945 he was diagnosed with TB, and it was during his long convalescence that he began to paint. A holiday in Cornwall in 1955 introduced him to the thriving, international artists’ colony in St Ives and, after premature retirement from the bank on health grounds, he eventually took the plunge and moved there. Gradually he developed his artistic voice, a form of representational abstraction that, following Gerard Manley Hopkins, he referred to as “inscape” rather than landscape. It is generally agreed that he made his best work in the 1980s. His pictorial grammar included an array of angular, darting, rhythmic forms, variously evoking the movement of fish in water and the movement of water itself, the flight of birds across the sky and the staccato sound of birdcalls against the landscape. His father first brought him to Clare Island when he was in his teens. The reverse of this painting is liberally inscribed with words from the Death by Water section of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Two overlapping sets of writing in the artist’s hand suggest that he revisited, and perhaps revised, the painting, and that it had particu- lar significance for him. It is entirely possible that he was commemorating the centenary of his paternal grand- father’s death by drowning (he perished en route from the mainland to Clare Island in 1883). O’Malley returned to the theme in a fine 1985 painted construction, ‘Sea Dirge – Full fathom five thy father lies /Of his bones are coral made.’ This time the quotation is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. As it happens, Eliot plucked a quote (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”) from that same verse in another section of The Waste Land. Aidan Dunne, February 2019 € 10,000 - 15,000