Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1 MARCH 2023

92 82 DANIEL O’NEILL (1920-1974) Indecision Oil on board, 86.5 x 75cm (34 x 29½”) Signed Provenance: Sale, these rooms 31st March 1999, lot 86 Exhibited: Irish Exhibition of Living Art, The National College of Art, Kildare Street, Dublin, 16 August to 10 September 1950, catalogue no. 74. € 15,000 - 20,000 Indecision is an extremely ambiguous and emotionally charged painting and reveals both O’Neill’s ambition and also his aware- ness of his contemporaries. Painted not long after O’Neill had travelled to Paris, where he had painted Place du Tertre (NMNI) and possibly also The Blue Skirt , which he exhibited the previous year at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art , Indecision appears to show a Belfast street scene. While birds often appeared in Colin Middleton’s paintings, often alongside female figures, and cats occurred in those of Gerard Dillon, animals are seen less regularly in O’Neill’s work. Indecision is a painting which fits more closely alongside those of his contemporaries than is usual, recalling the Belfast street scenes Middleton and Dillon had painted in the early 1940s; but the heightened emotional mood of the work is typical of O’Neill at this period. In part this mood is expressed through swirling passages of impasto and tenebrist lighting that set a dramatic tone and give an almost hallucinatory mood to the stark setting. This setting is highly theatrical; light pours from a streetlight and two illuminated windows in a building behind the girl (although she appears to be facing a light source as well). Her simplified, mask-like features prefigure similarly treated figures in a slightly later painting such as Birth (1952), as well as recalling O’Neill’s interest in painting puppets. This anonymity allows him to use the girl’s posture to express emotions of doubt and uncertainty, with her shoulders weighed down and her feet poised on the edge of the pavement and half in shadow, appearing to being about to carry her cat away from the brightly lit buildings behind her. The cat seems to capture something of the girl’s personality as well as her vulner- ability and social isolation. Her pink-ish coat or cardigan recalls the red waistcoats that are so often worn by men in O’Neill’s early work, and along with her red beret the use of colour isolates her from the street scene behind. The exact nature of the situation ap- pears elusive but it is interesting to note that in the 1940s O’Neill had exhibited paintings with titles such as Trapped, Reverberation and Meditation by the Sea, suggesting that he found these almost Victorian themes extremely stimulating in the subjects they sug- gested. Dickon Hall