WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART MONDAY 26 SEPTEMBER 2022

76 48 Daniel O’Neill (1920-1974) A PROMISE MADE IS A DEBT UNPAID oil on board signed lower right; titled on Dawson Gallery label on reverse 18 by 24in. (45.7 by 61cm) Frame Dimensions: 27 by 33in. (68.6 by 83.8cm) Provenance: Dawson Gallery, Dublin; Collection of Dr John F. Boyle; de Veres, 3 October 2006, lot 27; Private collection Born in Belfast in 1920 Dan O’Neill was largely self-taught as a painter and along with fellow Northern Irish artists Gerard Dillon, Colin Middleton and George Campbell exhibited regularly in Belfast and particularly in Dublin with the Victor Waddington Gallery who, in the 1940s/50s, successfully promoted O’Neill’s career at home and abroad, for example he was included in group exhibitions in Canada and the USA. Early in his career O’Neill had worked for a short time in the studio of Sidney Smith who, together with Gerard Dillon, introduced him to French art, inter alia Rouault, Cezanne and Picasso. He also visited Paris for the first time c.1948/49. It may be noted that Waddington also represented Jack B. Yeats; and O’Neill as well as Campbell made works as an homage to Yeats. The title of the painting ‘A Promise Made is a Debt Unpaid’ would appear to be a line of verse taken from Robert Service’s somewhat melodramatic poem‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ from the collection ‘Songs of a Sourdough’ (1907). Service became known as ‘The Bard of the Yukon’ and the popular poem is about the death of a man prospecting for gold in Alaska and north west Canada. The narrator in the poem struggles with delivering on a promise he made to McGee that he would cremate his body rather than let him, as the prospector worried, be buried under snow and ice. The tone of the poem’s development is one of tension, suspense and foreboding as well as perseverance - characteristics that often define O’Neill’s work. Other lines in the poem, such as ‘There are strange things done in the midnight Sun’ and ‘The marge (shore) of Lake Lebarge’ would seem to also strike correspondences with the O’Neill painting. There are many examples in the artist’s work of female figures on a beach, often in small groupings where the sea is often deployed as an atmospheric mood setting background element. This painting by the artist has two groups of female figures and a child standing on what appears to be a lake shore, all wearing plain, simple full-length dresses in light colours. The startled group in the foreground is composed of three figures, two of whom look anxiously towards the viewer; the other figure looks back towards a mid-distance group - a looking forward and a looking back. The orchestration and disposition of the figures set the framework for apprehension. The ominous ‘Yeatsian’ sky, with its investment in swirling liquid paint, what Calvin Bedient calls ‘brush-storms’, further conspires in the sense of premonition. By contrast the darker more textured landscape foreground is fired up by outbreaks and stretches of almost dayglo colours in red, orange and yellow. It may be noted that O’Neill often deployed a limited range of rich colours and impasto to invoke a visionary, unsettling atmosphere. As in other works O’Neill in this painting registers a profound presentiment of something out of time and ‘off stage’ which has unsettled the figures and disturbed the landscape - a promise made, a debt unpaid? Prof. Liam Kelly August 2022 €20,000-€30,000 (£17,240-£25,860 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot48