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paintings from the esb collection
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december 2014
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John Skelton (1924-2009)
Collecting Driftwood
Oil on board 29 x 41cm (11 x 16”)
Signed
€800 - 1,200
Born in Co. Armagh in 1925 John Skelton studied at Queens University in Belfast, Belfast
College of Art and St Martin’s School of Art, London. It was in London that he started his pro-
fessional career and where he came under influence of the Euston Road School in the late 1940s.
He moved to Dublin in 1950 and worked initially in advertising as Art Director and illustrator of
books, most of them educational. After 1975 he worked full-time as a painter. He had numerous
one man shows in Dublin; two in Belfast, one in Los Angeles and one in the Mystic Seaport
Museum in Connecticut. Up to the late 1980s, he was a frequent exhibitor in group shows, par-
ticularly the annual Royal Hibernian Academy and the Watercolour Society shows in Dublin. In
more recent years however, his work was in such demand that he contributed to these less often.
During the 1970s and early 1980s he earned a reputation as a gifted teacher and lecturer in the
National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He died in Dublin in 2009.