Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 9th December 2020

70 60 DANIEL O’NEILL (1920-1974) Flora Oil on board, 45.5 x 36cm (18 x 14’’) Signed; inscribed with title on label verso While Daniel O’Neill rarely painted from the model, it is accepted that the particular facial type that recurs thought his early paintings of the female figure derives from his first wife Eileen. Her ‘’dark-eyed Italiante face’’, as Cecil Salkeld described it, also lent itself to a mannered stylisation that recalled the Italian primitive painters that so influenced O’Neill. This hieratic quality allowed the female figure to take on many attributes within O’Neill’s work and to carry a weight of meaning that went beyond the purely personal and Flora exemplifies this. The simple portrait of a solemn girl whose hair is entwined with flowers allows O’Neill to show off his fluid handling of paint and skill at building up a surface, as well as to place his work in the broad tradition of western painting in which the goddess Flora is often depicted. These classical references perhaps signify the broader meanings of the figure, aligning it with the traditional association of Flora, with the coming of spring and also with fertility. As a passionate painter of the landscape O’Neill might have been interested in repre- senting it through this personification of nature, but the suggestion of fertility brings this painting back to a more personal level as Eileen has given birth to their daughter in 1943. The painting is both sensuous and intimate but there remains a subtle sense of melan- choly. Dickon Hall € 8,000 - 12,000