Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

44 26 DANIEL O’NEILL (1920-1974) Sunday Oil on board, 43.5 x 58.8cm (17 x 23’’) Signed; inscribed verso Provenance: With The Eakin Gallery, Belfast, where acquired by the present owner. € 15,000 - 25,000 Daniel O’Neill, the son of an electrician, was born in Belfast and was largely self-taught despite having the opportunity, albeit a brief one, to attend Belfast College of Art. His early career as an artist was dominated by the onset of the Second World War and it was only in the later 1940s that O’Neill had the opportunity to travel to the Continent where he came across the work of the Fauvists and Expressionists who made a lasting impression on him. Daniel O’Neill’s paintings often contain a degree of enigma. It is for his figures in landscapes that perhaps he is best known, and it is the relationship between these two elements that evokes the unanswerable curiosity of the viewer. Sunday, a vividly colourful landscape that has as the centre of it’s composition two figures making their way across the picture plane, towards some trees and a graveyard beyond. O’Neill returned many times to female subjects within west of Ireland landscapes, using a stylised and idiosyncratic format, and often placing them within deserted open spaces, or as in this instance two brightly dressed women perhaps heading to mass or indeed to visit the graves of their forebears. While it is not typical of the artist to use such an array of bright colours, the palette chosen is made up of a striking variety of tones. O’Neill uses thick impastoed brushstrokes to capture the luscious vegetation, rendered in vivid yellows, greens, russets and purple tones. The application of quick upright strokes creates a sense of movement in the image, we can imagine the trees and gorse bushes swaying in the wind. Brian Fallon remarked of Daniel O’Neill, ‘he is an excellent Landscapist. But in the Yeat- sian way - there is more imagination than topography’ and concluded that O’Neill’s best works ‘are charged with that mysteri- ous and unquantifiable quality which gives Art its purpose.’ John Hewitt, writing on the subject of O’Neill’s impasto techniques, noted ‘the work has both a sensory as well as a sensual quality’. Commenting further he remarked, ‘through his poetry, he handles the great commonplace of being; birth, death, love, belief, wonder’. An exhibition, Daniel O’Neill: Romanticism and Friendships is currently running at Farmleigh Gallery, Phoenix Park, Dublin and finishes on June 6th.