36
ALOYSIUS O’KELLY (1853-1936) was born in Dublin as Aloysius Kelly, and emigrated to London in
1861, where he adopted the prefix O’. O’Kelly belonged to a Fenian family. His older brothers,
James, Charles and Stephen, were all Fenians, and sculptors (trained by their uncle, John Lawlor,
the well-known Irish sculptor in London). O’Kelly lived a life of art and sedition, operating as a
painter and activist in Ireland, Britain, France and the United States, as well as in outposts of the
empire, such as Sudan and Egypt. His connections to the shadowy world of Irish republican
politics permeated his work. Aloysius was closest to James, who was instrumental in building up
the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Britain, was active in the Land League, was elected Member
of Parliament for Roscommon in 1880 and a key figure in securing Charles Stewart Parnell’s
agreement for the New Departure. The most radical Irish artist of his era, O’Kelly was prolific and
eclectic: Realist in Ireland, Naturalist in France and Orientalist in North Africa, forging all the time
new connections between art and anti-colonial politics.
O’Kelly was accepted by the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1874, to the studio of Jean-Léon
Gérôme (1824-1904), a not inconsequential achievement. He also studied with the portraitist,
Joseph-Florentin-Léon Bonnat (1833-1922). He was one of the first Irish artists to go to Brittany, to
Pont–Aven, and later Corncarneau. There he mixed with the American colony blending academic,
realist and
plein-air
elements into an innovative mode of rural Naturalism.
From France, O’Kelly returned to Ireland in the early 1880s, as ‘Special Artist’ to
The Illustrated
London News,
giving visual expression to the harsh realities of Irish rural life. Here the
Freeman’s
Journal
declared him ‘the most important of modern artists’, and of ‘exceptionally high rank’ (2
June 1888). His
Mass in a Connemara Cabin
(National Gallery of Ireland, 1883) had the distinction
of being the first painting of an Irish subject ever exhibited in the Paris Salon.
In North Africa, O’Kelly painted many typical scenes, but tended to avoid the emblems of
Orientalism, scenes of extremism and characterisations of incompetence that might justify
colonial domination. His North African and Middle Eastern paintings reveal a predominantly
ethnographic interest. His adoption of the name Oakley in Cairo also points to political activism,
leading to a dangerous adventure in which he and his brother, James, followed their friend,
Edmond O’Donovan, the Fenian and internationally renowned journalist, to Sudan in 1883/4,
where they allied themselves with the forces of the Mahdi. As well as being a work of artistic
merit, the watercolour,
Edmond O’Donovan as an Orientalist
(lot 49), is thus an important political
painting.
O’Kelly maintained family contacts in England where he painted
English Peasant Chopping
Swedes
(opposite, lot 45) c.1887/8. In 1895, he left for the US from but returned regularly to
France for the summers. Here he painted the Brittany paintings presented in this sale (see lots 46,
47, 51 and 52) in the early years of the twentieth century. And in 1897, he came back to Ireland in
an (unsuccessful) attempt to offer himself as a candidate for election as MP for South
Roscommon.
In New York he executed a number of portraits of prominent Irish-American politicians, painted
views of the city, as well as traveling around the art colonies of America, resulting in many
landscape studies of Maine. He returned to Ireland again in 1926, aged seventy-three, still
pressing his case for the establishment of a national school of painting. There followed a final
sojourn in Brittany, before he returned to America where he died in 1936.
Professor Emeritus Niamh O’Sullivan
February 2013
WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
I...,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35 37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,...153