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

84 61 Frances J. Kelly HRUA ARHA ROI FRSA (1908-2002) FLOWER PIECE oil on canvas signed with initials lower left 20 by 16in. (50.8 by 40.6cm) Frame Dimensions: 25 by 21in. (63.5 by 53.3cm) Impression of stretcher visible in raking light. Crack visible along impression upper centre. This has not led to flaking of the paint. Otherwise good condition. Provenance: Dawson Gallery, Dublin; Gorry Gallery Dublin; Private collection Whyte’s, 18 May 2009, lot 100; Private collection Exhibited: ‘Frances Kelly Exhibition’, Dawson Gallery, Dublin, 10 October, 1946, catalogue no. 17 (‘Decorative Flower Piece’, price 35 Gns.); ’Frances Kelly’, 2-12 March, 2005, Gorry Gallery, Dublin, catalogue no. 66 Frances Kelly studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where she was a star pupil, exhibiting frequently at the RHA from the age of twenty-one. In 1932 she became the first recipient of the Henry Higgins travelling scholarship, which enabled her to go to Paris and study with the cubist painter Léopold Survage. She returned to Dublin and established herself primarily as a portrait painter; George Furlong, Basil Goulding, Joseph Hone, Frank O’Connor and Michael Scott were amongst her sitters. During the 1940s at her solo exhibitions with the Dawson Gallery and the Dublin Painters Gallery she also exhibited a notable number of still life paintings. S. B. Kennedy describes her: “…strong feeling for light, air and space, often rendered in pale colours and with a predominance of greys, against which she would set bright reds, violets and other colours which thrill with their radiance” (Irish Art and Modernism, page 58). After her marriage to Irish statesman F. H. Boland (1904-1985) and the birth of five daughters (including poet Eavan Boland) she moved to London and then New York. Her last exhibited works were two Connemara landscapes in the Irish Living Art Exhibition of 1954. €2,000-€3,000 (£1,740-£2,610 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot61