WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART MONDAY 31 MAY 2021 AT 6PM

60 45 Seán Keating PPRHA HRA HRSA (1889-1977) THINKING OUT GOBNET [PORTRAIT OF HARRY CLARKE] 1917 oil on canvas signed, titled and with original price on handwritten label preserved on reverse; also dedicated [John Keating / To Harry Clarke / 29 Aug 1917] on the stretcher on reverse and in Irish script on canvas; with original Daniel Egan framing label 30 by 30in. (76.2 by 76.2cm) Frame Dimensions: 37 by 37in. (94 by 94cm) Overall very good and stable condition. Close examination reveals some very minor surface dirt. Stable drying cracks - likely to have occurred at the time of execution - visible in the lower right corner and to lower left, behind the upright slab, in dark brown paint only. No cracking, flaking or loss evident. Delicate areas of impasto in the trunk and branches of the tree are intact. The canvas is well tensioned. The picture appears to have been conserved in the past and possibly wax lined with some small spots of selective retouching to the upper left and centre visible under UV. The inscriptions verso, on the canvas and the stretcher, are both clearly legible and the original label is also preserved. The painting is presented unglazed in its Daniel Egan frame which has been restored and hand-finished in a matt black with muted a gold slip added. Provenance: A gift from the artist to Harry Clarke RHA (1889-1931); Private collection; James Adam & Bonhams, 7 December 2005, lot 78; Private collection; Whyte’s, 1 October 2018, lot 26; Private collection Exhibited: RHA, Dublin, 1918, catalogue no. 339 (Lent by Harry Clarke); ’The Arts and Crafts Movement: Making It Irish’, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, USA, 6 February to 5 June, 2016; ’Conflicting Visions in a Turbulent Age 1900–1916’, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, 3 June to 20 August 2016 Literature: N., Gordon Bowe, The Life andWork of Harry Clarke, Dublin, 1989, plate no. 64; Éimear O’Connor, Seán Keating: Art, Politics and Building the Irish Nation (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2013), pp. 63-4; Éimear O’Connor, Conflicting Visions in a Turbulent Age 1900-1916, catalogue for eponymous exhibition, Crawford Art Gallery Cork (Cork: Crawford Art Gallery, 2016), pp. 60-1; Éimear O’Connor, ‘Harry Clarke and Seán Keating: Art, Inspiration and the Aran Islands’ in R. Kennedy, A. Griffiths & M. Helmers (eds.), Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, forthcoming November 2018), chapter 5 Harry Clarke and Seán Keating met at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1911. With interests in common they became friends and it was Clarke who introduced Keating to the Aran Islands in c.1912. While the islands had a profound effect on Keating’s artistic identity, and he continued to visit until 1965, as it turned out Clarke made his final trip there in 1915, a few months after he began the commission for his series of eleven windows for the Honan Chapel, Cork. As St Gobnait is traditionally associated with Ballyvourney in Co. Cork and with the Aran Islands, Keating’s painting offers evidence of the friendship between the two men and their mutual interest in the islands at the time. The painting simultaneously acknowledges Clarke’s extraordinary ingenuity evident in his tour de force portrayal of St Gobnait which was installed in the Honan Chapel in 1916, but possibly ‘thought out’ during that last trip to Aran in 1915 with Keating at his side.