ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 24th September 2025

70 41 SEAN MCSWEENEY (1935-2018) Conway’s Bog (1988) Oil on canvas, 122 x 167cm (47 x 66”) Signed and dated (19)’88; also signed, inscribed with title and dated verso Provenance: Sale, deVeres, Dublin, June 2019, lot 12 € 10,000 - 15,000 Sean McSweeney is widely celebrated as one of Ireland’s foremost interpreters of landscape, his art deeply rooted in the boglands, wetlands and shorelines of his native Roscommon and later Sligo. Painted in 1988, Conway’s Bog is a major canvas within his oeuvre, embodying the artist’s mature style at a moment of full expressive power. The subject matter is characteristic: a sweep of bogland, its patchwork of greens, yellow and whites punctuated by waterlogged pools that catch the shifting light. McSweeney’s brush translates this familiar Irish terrain into a language at once lyrical and modern, his vigorous handling of paint evoking both the material substance of the land and its atmos- pheric resonance. The bold, horizontal composition speaks to a profound engagement with place — the rhythms of nature distilled into painterly form. While rooted in a specific landscape, McSweeney’s work transcends topographical de- scription. His sensibility owes much to the Irish landscape tradition of Paul Henry and later Patrick Collins, yet he brought to it an abstraction of vision and a physicality of surface that is uniquely his own. In Conway’s Bog , areas of impasto and sweeping strokes animate the canvas, capturing the elemental vitality of the Irish midlands. Large-scale canvases of this ambition are rare in McSweeney’s oeuvre and attest to the artist’s confidence in the late 1980s, a period when his reputation was firmly established and his distinctive visual language fully formed. Conway’s Bog stands as a testament to his lifelong devotion to the land, its memory, and its enduring presence in the Irish imagina- tion.