Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART Auction Wednesday 29th September 2021

90 81 SEÁN KEATING PPRHA RSA RA (1889-1977) Don Quixote Oil on board, 73.5 x 84cm (29 x 33’’) Signed verso Provenance: Boston (1927); British Artists Association, Buenos Aires (1928); Helen Hackett Gallery New York (1929); Grace Horn Gallery, Boston (1929). € 30,000 - 50,000 For Irish artist, Seán Keating, the artistic and allegorical possibilities offered by literature were endless. A fluent French speaker, his interest in all things Spanish was ignited on meeting his future wife, May Walshe, in 1916. Raised in a convent in Spain, May was so immersed in the culture that the language of her dreams was Spanish. It was hardly surprising that he would turn to one of the best-known works of Spanish literature to critique issues such as self-invention, social change, questions of truth, and the cult of individualism at the time. Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, followed by a second volume in 1615, and ever since the central eponymous and comical character has been popular as a satirical metaphor for those not enamoured of the political classes, or of the self-satisfied. Formerly Alonso Quijano, the delusional old man read so many chivalric novels that he lost his mind. Led by his over-ripe imagination, he decided to transform himself into a knight. He created a cardboard helmet and found himself an ancient horse and an old suit of armour. In the guise of Don Quixote he took to the roads to serve his nation as a chivalric knight, but failed miserably in the face of a series of catastrophic events. Along the way he acquired the services of an elderly assistant, Sancho Panza, otherwise known as the magician, whose role was initially self-serving, yet ultimately, he helped his master through the reality of the terrible tribulations that they encountered. The first image in a series of three relating to Don Quixote was El Prestigiador Despojado (The Magician) , a portrait of Sancho Panza, which was painted by the artist in 1918. It is now in the collection of the Crawford Gallery in Cork. Keating did not return to the theme again until the late 1920s, and when he did, it was Don Quixote’s character that offered him the opportunity to allegorically critique the impractical pursuit of idealist goals by politicians, and individuals amid the socially, economically, and politically problematic years of the late 1920s and 30s. Indeed, it was Don Quixote who gave his name to the term ‘quixotic.’ Thus, this version, Quixote, was the first of two images of the unlucky knight. Painted in the artist’s home in Killakee in the Dublin Mountains in 1927, it was initially sent to an exhibition in Boston organised by the then President of the RHA, Dermod O’Brien. Quixote is a quiet and contemplative painting in which the eponymous antihero appears without his suit of armour. He sits in an undefined but decorative interior setting, his hand on a book, his sword and helmet on the table, thinking about his future, and of his supposedly chivalric deeds. But he has yet been fully taken over by the delusions that haunt the character in the book. That was to come in the second version of the painting, which Keating produced amid major political change in Ireland in 1932, and titled Don Quixote (sold in Adams in 2010). Don Quixote is described in the novel as tall and gaunt. Keating always chose his models to suit the character he wanted to portray. In this instance, he used a man with suitable physical attributes from among those that modelled the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. The same man appears in this ver- sion, Quixote (1927), in Quixote Model’s Interval (1927) (private collection), in Good Old Stuff (1928) (private collection) and in Don Quixote (1932). Dr Éimear O’Connor HRHA Author: Seán Keating: Art, Politics, and Building the Irish Nation (IAP, 2013). Director: The Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig.