IMPORTANT IRISH ART Monday 4 December 2023 at 6pm, Lots 1-133

24 14 Aloysius C. O’Kelly (1853-1936) THE DESERT CHARGE oil on canvas 18 by 30in. (45.7 by 76.2cm) Frame Size: 23.5 by 35.5in. (59.7 by 90.2cm) Provenance: Family of the artist; Whyte’s, 24 November 2014, lot 13; Private collection; Whyte’s, 27 November 2017, lot 123; Private collection Indicative of a broader plan to destabilise Britain in Ireland, in 1883 Aloysius O’Kelly and his brother James went to Sudan to report on the British campaign against the Mahdi, James as correspondent for the Daily News and Aloysius as illustrator for the Pictorial World. With them were a number of French revolutionaries and Socialists who had forged alliances with Irish militant and cultural Nationalists during O’Kelly’s sojourn in Paris in the 1870s. British involvement in the region was ostensibly to end the slave trade but, in reality, to extend Anglo-Egyptian influence further south. In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdallah declared himself the prophesied Mahdi and called for a jihad to purge Islam of the infidel and rout the foreign forces from Sudan. His fearsome reputation as a violent anti- colonialist grew over the next three years. The jihad had strong resonance for Fenian opponents of the British regime in Ireland. If ‘England is engaged in a great war that will strain her resources to the utmost’, wrote James O’Kelly to Michael Davitt, ‘seizing some critical moment [if we] attack her with all our power... we help ourselves by promoting the long wished for “opportunity”.’There was much at stake; according to the Victorian domino theory, Irish demands for Home Rule constituted the beginning of the disintegration of the empire. The mantra, that Britain’s pain was Ireland’s gain, was given powerful visual expression by O’Kelly. This work is part of a unique series of paintings and illustrations of these events. Most war artists acted, in effect, as public relations personnel for Britain’s colonial projects overseas. O’Kelly’s decision to cover the colonial war from behind the battle lines of Britain’s enemy was thus an act of remarkable audacity. O’Kelly painted many scenes in the Orientalist manner of his master, Jean-Léon Gérôme. But desert skirmishes, such as this, full of colour and movement, gave rise to several virtuoso paintings by O’Kelly that are unusual in that they demonstrate an early application of Impressionist technique to an Orientalist subject, a further indication of O’Kelly’s originality. O’Kelly was at his best when adapting an aesthetic subversion to a political one. Professor Niamh O’Sullivan Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin; author of Aloysius O’Kelly: Art, Nation, Empire, Field Day Publications, 2010; Founding Curator of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Quinnipiac University. €10,000-€15,000 (£8,700-£13,040 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot14