ADAM'S IRISH OLD MASTERS 14 MAY 2026

52 40 ROBERT GEORGE KELLY (1822-1910) A Killarney Colleen Oil on board, 60 x 44.5cm Signed and titled, verso; further inscribed 'Ellen Leahy / daughter of Matthew Leahy / Boatman / Muckross, Killarney' Exhibited: Royal Hibernian Academy, 1879, no. 609 € 3,000 - 5,000 When the work was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1879 it was identified by the generic title A Killarney Colleen but when inscribing it the artist broke with convention by identifying the subject. She is Ellen Leahy the daughter of Matthew Leahy, the boatman at Muckross House, Killarney, County Kerry. Rejecting the tendency of both the Romantic and Picturesque traditions to anonymize the rural figures which popu- late so much nineteenth-century Irish landscape art, Kelly allows us to put a name to a face and, in so doing, offers insight into the individuality of life in County Kerry. Ellen is shown barefoot but neatly dressed with a cloak of green woollen tartan. She carries a noggin, the multi-purpose vernacular vessel used for eating and drinking. Earlier, when Lady Chatterton explored Ireland in the 1830s, she noted a similar encounter, noting ‘some girls brought us milk in the pretty white vessels so universally used for that purpose in Kerry’ (cited Claudia Kinmonth, ‘Noggins, “the nicest work of all”: traditional Irish wooden vessels for eating and drinking’, IA&DS, Vol XVIII (2015)). Kelly’s treatment of Ellen Leahy is noticeably sympathetic. He makes her the subject of what is a portrait rather than a genre painting or ethnographic document and, most unusu- ally in Irish art, a portrait not of the gentry but of the rural working class. This empathetic treatment of the rural poor should not surprise, as Kelly was responsible for ‘perhaps the most remarkable and atypical painting by an Irish artist during the Famine’. An Ejectment in Ireland , also known as A Tear and a Prayer for Ireland , caused a furore when it was exhibited at the British Institution in 1853 (fig1). Kelly’s radical painting was attacked in the press and its controversial subject matter was even discussed in the House of Commons. Adding to the offence caused by the sympathetic treatment for the evicted family’s plight, was the fact that it depicted ‘agents of the state enforcing the landlord’s will’ (Tom Dunne in Whipping the Herring, Crawford (Cork, 2006) p. 58). Here, as in An Ejectment, Kelly shows himself a talented landscape painter with an ability to capture surface and detail – clearly apparent in the treatment of the noggin. Kelly was born in Dublin on 22 January 1822, study- ing at the Royal Dublin Society and subsequently at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and, in 1842, from an address in Glasnevin, began to exhibit at the R.H.A.. Three years later his portrait of his mother ‘attracted attention as the work of a young artist of promise’, and his precocity is clearly apparent in the ambition of his self-portrait in the chamber of the R.H.A. dat- ed 1847 (fig). Kelly later worked in England, settling in Manchester and Birkenhead, and exhibiting at the Royal Academy. He mostly painted landscapes, some portraits but also ambitious figurative works including Elijah Running before the Chariot of Ahab. Muckross House was built for Henry Arthur Herbert and his wife, the watercolourist, Mary Balfour, to designs by William Burn. It was famously visited by Queen Victoria in 1861, and today forms the focal point of Ireland’s oldest national park. The house sits on Muckross Lake, one of the lakes of Killarney which is glimpsed in the background, and on which Matthew Leahy, Ellen’s father plied his trade as a boatman.