Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 25th September 2024

80 64 FRANK O’MEARA (1853-1888) A Knitting Shepherdess (1880) Oil on canvas, 40 x 29cm (15 x 11½”) Signed Provenance; The O’Meara Family Collection; Anna Frances Spring, nee, O’Meara 1847-1931, no.138, Rathgar Road, Dublin (Frank O’Meara’s eldest sister). Inherited by Madeline Mary O’Meara, of 6 Burrin St., Carlow, in Feb 1931, sold in 1957; Private Irish Collection. Literature; Referred to ‘as a small study of a young French girl crafting in a gold frame’, by David Smithers O’Meara, the artist’s nephew in 1978. Further information on O’Meara’s work on the theme of a Grez Shepherdess may be found in The Irresistible Frank O’Meara, An Irish Artist in France , by Mary Stratton Ryan. P 78-79. € 10,000 - 15,000 The subject of a young Shepherdess spinning and knitting, using wool from her own flock, is a theme first brought into prominence by French artist Jean –Francois Millet 1814-1875 when painting in Bar- bizon in the 1850s. Millet is known primarily for his sympathetic images of rural workers in the French countryside. One of his favourite subjects was of a young shepherdess who concentrates on her knit- ting while her flock grazes nearby. Millet sketched, etched and painted several versions of this subject in pastel, and oils. Some of his most admired stud- ies are The Knitting Shepherdess (1857) a pastel painting held in the Saint Louis Art Museum, For- est Park, Missouri, USA. A fine etching entitled The Grand Shepherdess , Knitting is held in the Scottish National Gallery. A more highly finished oil painting entitled Shepherdess with Her Flock 1863 is on dis- play in Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Two Irish Artists who painted in Barbizon and who greatly admired Millet’s work were Dublin born Nathaniel Hone, the younger 1831-1917 and Carlow born Frank O’Meara 1853-1888. Hone lived in Bar- bizon and later in Bourron Marlotte for 17 years and he knew Millet. One of Hone’s earliest extant paint- ings, is a rare ‘figure study’ by him, of a Shepherd- ess, titled Girl in a White Shawl (1857) (National Gal- lery of Ireland no 1479). This picture has been the subject of a fascinating and ingenius article by Dr Campbell, in which the author by a strange twist of fate brings together Hone’s Shepherdess with that of Bohemian [ Prague] artist Sobeslay Pinkas’ Shep- herdess, both paintings are of the same model in an interior setting, painted at exactly the same time in Bourron Marrlotte in1857. Having studied together in the Paris atelier of Couture c. 1854-57, the artists show Couture’s influence in subject and technique, as well as that of Corot and Millet with the naturalis- tic approach of French painting.[1] Twenty-three years later Carlow artist Frank O’Meara, who had painted in Barbizon, while Mil- let was still painting there, was settled in the artist’s colony of Grez sur Loing. O’Meara, a pioneer art- ist, and a highly respected painter and Art Master, was central to the artistic life in the village. He was an early founder of the Grez School of painting, in 1875. In late 1878 and early 80s he was beginning to focus on single figure studies, with a lighter to- nalist palette which was a major development in his work moving away from his earlier figureless land- scapes and deeper toned palette. Amongst this fellow painters was Louis Welden Hawkins, (1849-1910) who had shared accom- modation in Paris with Irish writer George Moore, during his student years at the atelier Julian. ‘It was only after Hawkins arrival at Grez-sur-Loing, and his work carried out alongside O’Meara, that Hawkins’ tonalist style emerged and he had his meteoric suc- cess at the Salon of 1881 with Les Orphelins . [ The Orphans was originally entitled Love Rises from the Ashes ] [2] [1] Dr Julian Campbell, The Shepherdess of Mar- lotte, Irish Arts Review, vol.,19, no1. Summer 2002 pp91-94.] [2] [Anne Koval, Shades of Grey Louis Welden Hawkins, Owens Art Gallery, Canada, 2010, p22. ‘There is a photograph in the Hawkins Collection