Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 4 DECEMBER 2024

Brittany are the closest of kin and from one common Celtic stock, the affection and family ties, and to neighbourhood and communal yearnings, find here uni- versal expression to a degree that almost approaches pathos’. ( Wakeman’s Wan- derings, Weekly Inter Ocean , 7 January 1890). Wakeman went on to cite their respective ‘love of and reverence for babies’, as shines through here. O’Kelly’s paintings of both Irish and Breton people insistently reflect a hard-working, healthy and dignified people, as projected here. O’Kelly moved around Brittany over more than a fifty-year period. From the distinctive clothes, the setting in this painting can be identified as the pays de Rosporden (around Concarneau and the Fôret de Fouesnant): the women wear white linen coiffes and wide collars, dark skirts, fitted bodices, embroidered waistcoats, and heavy wooden sabots; the men woollen jackets, waistcoats, bragoù-bras, black gaiters and felt broad-rimmed hats. The table and the rush-woven Breton chairs are timeless, but other aspects identify the painting as early twentieth century, notably the visible hair of the women (previously, no self-respecting girl would have herself painted with her hair even partially uncovered). Over time, O’Kelly’s Breton landscapes and sea- scapes became increasingly and iridescently impressionistic, while his interior scenes retained their structure and hark back to Dutch seventeenth-century interiors and, more contemporaneously, the work of American artist, Robert Wylie. Executed towards the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the dark interior of The Christening Party , connects these paintings to a considera- bly earlier form of genre painting, characterized by academic draughtsmanship and conventional painting skills. Notwithstanding their archaism, the compres- sion of so many figures in The Christening Party into such a confined space demanded considerable skill, in addition to which he countered the apparent informality of the figures by granting to each an individualised physiognomy. The loose yet controlled brushwork, broad values, and strong contrasts evident in the portraits are a testament to Bonnat’s realist teaching. The treatment of the still life on the upper shelf verges on the semi abstract and contrast with the narrative details that include the man pouring the drink with his left hand on his companion’s shoulder, the young girl wiping the bowl, the man lighting his pipe, the shadowy figure in the background squatting low to tap the cider. The painting is full of gesture and expression. Notwithstanding the dark interior, the play of light on form, on the bottles and glasses, on the rugged furniture, on the animated faces of the figures, is typical of O’Kelly, an artist who painted sometimes separately, sometimes coterminously tightly and precisely, and loosely and freely. Prof. Niamh O’Sullivan, October 2024