WHYTE'S EXCEPTIONAL IRISH ART MONDAY 7 DECEMBER 2020

100 62 Daniel O’Neill (1920-1974) GIRL WITH HOOP oil on board signed lower right; titled on George Waddington Galleries [Montreal] label on reverse; also titled on Eakin Gallery [Belfast] label on reverse 24 by 18in. (61 by 45.7cm) Frame Size: 31.5 by 25.5in. (80 by 64.8cm) Condition: This work appears to be in very good condition. The board is stable and the surface is clean. There is some slight cracking visible on very close inspection at the bottom of the hoop. This has not led to flaking of the paint. Provenance: ’European & American Art’, Ritchies, Toronto, 30 November 1994, lot 162; Private collection; Acquired from the previous owner in 1997 Exhibited: Irish Exhibition of Living Art, Dublin, 1955 In 1945, Victor Waddington took on Daniel O’Neill as a gallery artist, providing him with a much needed outlet to exhibit and sell his paintings. This was the beginning of a highly successful professional relationship that saw works by the Belfast-born artist exhibited at the network Waddington galleries in Dublin, London and Montreal through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The distinctive Waddington frame, as seen on Girl with Hoop, is also testament to this, along with the extant label for the George Waddington Galleries, Montreal on the reverse. The Canadian branch of the Waddington Galleries held several exhibitions of works by O’Neill in the 1960s. This painting, however, had previously been shown in Dublin, appearing at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1955. Like many of O’Neill’s works from this period it is a striking composition, rich in colour and texture. On first glance, the two-tone red background of Girl with Hoop almost distracts from the painting’s main subject: the young girl, dressed more for a party than for play, shining in a vivid blue dress with white trim, her yellow-blonde hair completing O’Neill’s trio of primary colours. Writing about O’Neill’s work in 1949, Cecil Ffrench Salkeld noted that the artist was ‘luxuriating in his newly-won liberty and painting picture after picture of astonishing richness in texture’, traits certainly evident in Girl with Hoop. 1 Newspaper reviews of the 1955 exhibition were also fulsome in their praise for this painting. ‘E.S’, writing in the Irish Times noted that O’Neill had ‘created a world of his own as strange as exotic as any Xanadu … Rich in colour and sensuous in quality’; while in the Irish Independent, ‘N.L’ placed O’Neill’s work above his contemporary, Francis Bacon: the Belfast artist, they noted, ‘shows a talent which may well rank beside the great masters. Rich with humanity - the girl is painted with the tenderness of a Greuze without the sentimentality - he makes unequivocal statement in paint: his line is firm, exact and telling; his colour glowing, yet controlled.’ 2 Dr Kathryn Milligan November 2020 1 Cecil Ffrench Salkeld, ‘Daniel O’Neill, A Critical Appreciation’, Envoy, 1:1, December 1949. 2 See E.S., ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’, Irish Times, 18 August 1955, p. 4; and N. L, ‘Higher Standard at Living Art Show’, Irish Independent, 18 August 1955, p. 8. €18,000-€25,000 (£16,000-£22,220 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot62