IMPORTANT IRISH ART 3 MARCH 2025

62 41 Daniel O’Neill (1920-1974) BATHERS oil on board signed lower right; titled on partial, original Waddington gallery label on reverse 14 by 18in. (35.6 by 45.7cm) Frame Size: 18.5 by 22.75in. (47 by 57.8cm) Provenance: Adams, 28 March 2007, lot 17; Private collection Figures on a beach (single or in small groups) is something of a sub-theme in the work of Dan O’Neill. We tend to associate the theme of ‘bathers’ (Les Grandes Baigneuses) with early modernists working in the South of France at the beginning of the 20th century - Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso. These paintings often register a hedonistic playfulness - a joie de vivre. We know O’Neill did spend several months in France c.1948/9 and would have seen a range of such paintings in the public galleries there. However, with O’Neill, living and working in a Northern temperate climate, his treatment of figures on a beach, as with ‘Bathers’ in this auction, induces more of a melancholic atmosphere and an uneasiness. There are two figures in the foreground of the painting - one a reclining sensuous nude; the other a seated, somewhat demure and clothed upright figure. In the work of O’Neill, we often find the imaginative, at times haunting, interaction between figure and environment, mood and circumstance. In this regard, it may be noted with O’Neill that there is something of the legacy of the romantic idea of the affinity between the soul of mankind and nature. The raised section of the beach is shaped to offer some privacy to the women. The clothed figure averts her eyes away from the gaze of the artist/viewer, as if sensitive to and perhaps uneasy with the nudity of her companion or of a rift in a relationship. The painting’s ambiguity is part of its intriguing charm. O’Neill often relied on rich colours and impasto to impart a visionary quality in his work. The ecstatic sky, which is uniformly scumbled and textured in light blues and whites, adds a charge to the tension of the foreground scenography. The sea is treated as a marine blue and forms a strong horizon line, setting a ‘golden mean’ ratio with the remaining two thirds of the canvas which overall registers a very aesthetically satisfying structural composition. The vertical and horizontal disposition of the figures, as well as their overlapping placement, establishes the compositional and psychological focus of the painting. The inscape of the foreground section of the beach, it’s ‘sandiness’, is beautifully conceived and rendered. In 1945 he was taken on and supported career-wise by the Victor Waddington gallery in Dublin. Indeed the 1940s was an important period for the artist both critically and in work output. It may be noted that title ‘Bathers’ is written on a fragment of a Waddington label on the reverse of this canvas. Waddington also exhibited O’Neill’s work in Boston and Canada. There is a work, also called Bathers, in a private collection in Montreal. O’Neill is represented in private collections in Ireland, England, France, Holland, Sweden, USA, Canada and Israel. His work is also included in the following public collections; Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, The Arts Council of Ireland, The Municipal Gallery, Cork, The National Gallery, Melbourne and The Herbert Gallery, Coventry. Prof. Liam Kelly February 2025 €15,000-€20,000 (£12,500-£16,670 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot41