WHYTE'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART MONDAY 30 SEPTEMBER 2024 AT 6PM

66 41 Daniel O’Neill (1920-1974) MOTHER AND CHILD oil on canvas titled on reverse 24 by 20in. (61 by 50.8cm) Frame Size: 30 by 26in. (76.2 by 66cm) Provenance: Collection of George and Maura McClelland; Adam’s, 7 December 2005, lot 69; Private collection Literature: The Hunter Gatherer - The Collection of George and Maura McClelland, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2004 This painting depicts the artist’s wife Eileen and their daughter Patricia. Anne Marie Keaveney in writing on this painting for IMMA’s publication ‘The Hunter Gatherer - The Collection of George and Maura McClelland’, 2004, states: ’The lowkey colour in Mother and Child creates a mood of tenderness and quiet, almost religious in feeling, once again it is Eileen’s face swathed in muted blue. The close harmonies and the diagonal composition combine to make a satisfying whole and the use of glazes and impasto effects create an interesting surface quality.’ Dan O’Neill was a consummate figurative artist, often depicting female figures in a moody landscape setting or at times reclining sensuously on a beach. He painted many portraits of women in interior settings; at times with vistas glimpsed beyond an open window. These figures are often taken out of time and dressed in historical and exotic clothing in both interior and landscape settings. O’Neill often drew upon the Italian tradition for his stylistic treatment of his female figures but was also influenced by the impact that so called ‘primitive art’ had on the development of European modernism. Mother and Child is a recurrent theme in his work. Many artists have explored this theme from medieval and Renaissance times to the contemporary period - Bellini, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Picasso and Colin Middleton to David Hockney. The theme, emanating from the Virgin Mary and Child Jesus paintings, registers protection, compassion and tenderness, where the disposition of the figures are set up to interact emotionally in various ways. In Michelangelo’s Pieta, for example, it is only through death that the mother could have her child Jesus on her lap again. It may be noted that the wearing of the mantilla veil in the Catholic tradition registers an affinity with the purity of the Virgin Mary and the devotion of motherhood. O’Neill painted many versions of domestic family life, at times of his wife Eileen and daughter Patricia e.g. The Nursery and Bath Time. In this painting Mother and Child the mother, Madonna-like, is seated in a somewhat ornate chair, dressed as if for a wedding with a decorative veil. Indeed, the female child appears like a miniature version of the mother and seeks protection with an outstretched arm; the mother is depicted as demure, pensive but responsive. Her fixed facial expression is set by her heavy, drooped eye lids. In the original religious Virgin and Child paintings there was often a sense of premonition registered regarding the fate of the Child Jesus. In O’Neill’s painting a faint sense of foreboding prevails. Such an emotional disposition is further charged by the curved lines of the restless structure of the inner composition. As is often the case with the artist, lighting plays both a pictorial and spiritual role. As in other works, there is something of a debt to Picasso in the simple modelling of the face and oval shaping of the mother’s eyes. The figures are rendered in textured tones of blue and green set against the light orange, green folds of a drape in the background. The painting is reminiscent of the bride in The Marriage (1947) by O’Neill. Mother and Child was exhibited at the Victor Waddington Gallery, Dublin in 1946 - the 1940s being something of a decas mirabilis for the artist, in both critical endorsement and output, culminating in 1952 in a very successful exhibition at the CEMA Gallery, Belfast. Prof. Liam Kelly, August 2024 €20,000-€30,000 (£16,810-£25,210 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot 41