WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 27th September 2021 at 6pm

60 42 Daniel O’Neill (1920-1974) CULDAFF, COUNTY DONEGAL oil on board signed lower right; titled on reverse 20 by 24in. (50.8 by 61cm) Frame Dimensions: 29.5 by 33.5in. (74.9 by 85.1cm) Some surface dirt visible. Otherwise very good condition. Provenance: Waddington Galleries, Montreal, c. 1960s; Private collection Land (Bogland) in the early work of Seamus Heaney is the great repository, a national data bank. Referring to Ireland Brian O’Doherty has written that ‘The landscape, annotated with ruins, earthworks etc. can be seen as a repository of projected moods’. Dillon and O’Neill would have been drawn to Donegal partly for that reason. Dan O’Neill produced a number of paintings during his career, set in Co. Donegal, such as Boats At Falcarragh (1) and ‘Knockalla Hills’, (1951, Ulster Museum collection) In Culdaff, Co. Donegal the contrast of light and dark orchestrates all aspects of the composition. O’Neill is adept at subtly reframing landscape elements here for heightened emotional effect. In this painting a coastal inlet is flanked by houses elevated on two profiled dark escarpments creating a swirling vertiginous hiatus. The sky, painted in flux by a loaded brush and recalling Patrick Collins, by way of J.B. Yeats, depicts an impending threatening storm. His investment in the gestural liquid application of paint is deployed to great affect here. Two female figures, looking at the artist/viewer, can be made out among some unsettled curraghs in the foreground. Are they waiting for the return of their fishermen? If so it recalls the symbolism of the life/ death binary in Singe’s plays: the sea provides for life but also takes life away and women bear it out in every sense. It is noted that a painting by O’Neill, titled Near Culdaff, was included in an exhibition of Irish art that toured the USA and Canada in 1950. As demonstrated by the two paintings here under review - lots 40 and 42 - in O’Neill’s work we find the imaginative, often haunting interaction between figure and environment; mood and circumstance. These two works are fine examples of O’Neill at his best. Prof. Liam Kelly, September 2021 (1) Whyte’s, 12 March 2012, Lot 28 €15,000-€20,000 (£12,820-£17,090 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot42