WHYTE'S in association with CHRISTIE'S - The Ernie O'Malley Collection MONDAY 25 November 2019

THE ERNIE O’MALLEY COLLECTION · 25 NOVEMBER 2019 AT 6PM 47 WHYTES SINCE 1783 , 1 T I ’ LLECTION · 25 E BER 2019 T 6 brooding nostalgia associated with time as well as variation on the freer moments as of old’. Even in the more visionary work ‘all action is subordinated to thought’. 5 One cannot but think that O’Malley, in analysing Yeats’ painting, is thinking of his own experiences of physical and intellectual isolation as a revolutionary soldier in his youth and as a nonconformist in his later years. The late 1940s and 1950s were challenging for O’Malley and he saw little of Jack B. Yeats, who was then spending increasing amounts of time in the Portobello Nursing Home. O’Malley’s health was in decline also in these years. But his correspondence makes clear his continuing interest in his old friend and his work. In 1955 O’Malley deeply regretted missing what was to be Yeats’ last one-man exhibition at Waddington’s, when he was obliged to travel abroad and to cancel an arranged early morning visit to the gallery. He had missed the previous exhibition in 1953 when he was hospitalised with heart problems. In March 1955 O’Malley wrote of Yeats: ‘Once I went to see him when I was in Dublin almost once a week. I am very fond of Jack: he is getting old and now he cannot last long ...’. 6 Yeats kept the Christmas cards that O’Malley sent him in these years, including a handmade one, a watercolour painting, by the twelve year old Cormac O’Malley. 7 Ernie O’Malley died aged 59, on 25 March 1957. Jack Yeats died, aged 85, three days later, on 28 March. Despite the differences in their age and life experiences, they shared a rare and lasting friendship and a mutually understood vision of the Irish landscape and its people. Dr Róisín Kennedy September 2019 1 E. O’Malley, The Singing Flame, (Mercier Press, Cork, 1978), 137-38. 2 See Joint Exhibition of Jack B. Yeats Paintings from collections of Ernie O’Malley and the Yeats Museum, Sligo County Library, 2 to 20 Aug 1963. 3 Yeats thanked O’Malley for his contribution to organising the National Loan Exhibition by giving him several of his sketchbooks; and other sketches by John B. Yeats. 4 Ernie O’Malley, ‘The State of Painting in Ireland’, lecture 1946, reprinted in eds. C. O’Malley and N. Allen, Broken Landscapes. Selected Letters of Ernie O’Malley 1924-1957, (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2011), 403-06. 5 O’Malley,’Introduction’, Jack B. Yeats, National Loan Exhibition 1924-1957, Dublin, National College of Art, 1945. 6 Letter of Ernie O’Malley to Jean McGrail, 16-17 March 1955, reprinted in Broken Landscapes, 331. 7 Yeats Archive, National Gallery of Ireland. Jack B. Yeats with Ernie O’Malley at Richard King’s exhibition at The Waddington Gallery, June 1948. Inscription on sketchbook given to Ernie O’Malley by Jack Yeats.