Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 4 DECEMBER 2024

50 22 SIR WILLIAM ORPEN, RA RHA (1876-1931) Old John’s Cottage, Connemara (1908) Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 96.5cm (36 x 38’’) Signed and dated 1908 Provenance: Mrs Evelyn St George, 1908, (£200); A. St George & B. Duke, September 1989 to Pyms Gallery, London; Collection Vincent and Jacqueline O’Brien, Ireland 1971, thence by descent. Exhibited: Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, A Free Spirit, Irish Art, 1860-1960, 1990, no. 31 Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, on loan from 2017 to 2024. Literature: Sir William Orpen RA, Stories of Old Ireland and Myself, 1924 (Williams and Northgate), p. 34 (illus) PG Konody & Sidney Dark, Sir William Orpen, 1932 (Seeley Service & Co Ltd), p. 277 listed as ‘uncertain date’ Bruce Arnold, Orpen Mirror to an Age, 1981 (Jonathan Cape), 1981, p.239 Kenneth McConkey, A Free Spirit, Irish Art, 1860-1960, 1990 (Antique Collectors’ Club in association with Pyms Gallery, London), pp. 132-3 (illus). € 300,000 - 500,000 In 1907 when William Orpen was painting his first portrait of Gardenia St George at Screebe Lodge in Maam Cross, county Mayo, he visited the humbler abode of Seán and Máire Geoghegan - a cabin the interior of which became the setting for Old John’s Cottage, Connemara . The custodians of this ancient hearth, mute and motionless, project an iconic presence.¹ Their passivity carries the grief that came with the departure of their granddaugh- ter for New York where she would enter domestic service and never be seen again. The farewell was marked in what was described as an ‘American Wake’. The contrast between what he referred to as the ‘poorer classes’ pictured here, and the ‘As- cendancy’ circle in Louth where he would shortly paint the Vere Foster Family, (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) could not be greater.² Up to this point Orpen had mythologised the Dublin poor as a collection of ragged mounte- banks plying their trade on the Quays, but now he confronted the blank resignation of those for whom there was no escape from life’s hard land- scape. Travellers to this terrain, before and after Orpen’s depiction of two typical inhabitants, lifted their eyes to the hills and marvelled at its rugged beauty, while recognising that lands west of the Shannon, where Cromwell corralled the native Irish, was a place of desolation and destitution. Ravaged by poverty, famine and the ‘Land Wars’ of the 1880s, cabins like that in the present painting had been laid waste during the harsh evictions of recent memory. Vincent & Jacqueline O’Brien Collection