IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 28 September 2026

22 14 Aloysius C. O’Kelly (1853-1936) GATHERINGWRACK oil on canvas signed lower left 20 by 32in. (50.8 by 81.3cm) Frame Size: 33.5 by 44.5in. (85.1 by 113cm) Provenance: Sotheby’s, New York, 13 December 1980, lot 126, as ‘Horses Pulling a Load of Seaweed’; with Gorry Gallery, Dublin, 1982; Sotheby’s, London, 23 May 1984, lot 39; Private collection; de Veres, 14 February 1993, lot 77, as ‘Seaweed Gatherers, Connemara’; Private collection; Gorry Gallery, Dublin, 2016; Private collection Exhibited: ‘Reorientations. Aloysius O’Kelly: Painting, Politics and Popular Culture’, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 25 November 1999 to 30 January 2000, catalogue no. 4; ’An Exhibition of 18th-21st Century Irish Paintings’, Gorry Gallery, Dublin, 27 November to 10 December 2016, catalogue no. 23; ’Irish Horse’, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 10 June to 12 December 2020 (online exhibition) Literature: Niamh O’Sullivan, Reorientations. Aloysius O’Kelly: Painting, Politics and Popular Culture, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 1999; Aloysius O’Kelly: Art, Nation, Empire, Field Day, 2010, catalogue no. 201 From his training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with Jean-Léon Gérôme in the 1870s, and following many summers painting in Brittany, O’Kelly returned to the West of Ireland in the early 1880s as Special Artist to the Illustrated London News. His Irish paintings function as allegories of freedom, dignity and industry. Seaweed Gatherers (1885), for example, depicts the struggle for survival along the western coast, in what James Hack Tuke called this ‘region of desolation’.1 Years later, the artist Paul Henry described the Sisyphean ordeal of the peasants who clambered down the ‘steep track, rough and stony, to the beach which lay about two hundred feet below’, filled their creels with the wet, slippery seaweed, climbed back up the cliff to unload them, and then ‘walk[ed] down again ... all day, up and down’. 2 Collecting seaweed - used both as food and fertiliser - was wretched work, but an essential part of coastal life. It was gathered so intensively that beaches were ‘stripped bare’. In Connemara, seaweed was transported in a pardóg, a hinged basket strapped to a donkey (when the stick at the rear was pulled, the hinged under-section opened, allowing the load to be deposited). In later times, as we see here, it was transported by horse and cart, and as such could be set in either Connemara or Brittany. Whether Irish or Breton, O’Kelly was drawn to communities in transition. He focused on the physical demands of rural life, but also the resilience and industry of the communities he encountered. Although Gathering Wrack depicts a similar subject, this later painting stands in striking contrast to the 1885 version. It is considerably more expressionistic, presenting an image of more prosperous people in somewhat more prosperous times. O’Kelly has loosened his brushwork, here working in a more expressive and dynamic manner. Dating from the early years of the twentieth century, this painting remains reminiscent of his key Irish works of the 1880s, yet its setting is uncertain (he returned to Ireland regularly and to Brittany almost every year to the end of his life). Drawn to the rural periphery in both France and Ireland, O’Kelly countered the primitivist condescension of many of his contemporaries, and offered a fascinating instance of a linkage between stylistic versatility and political radicalism. Dr Niamh O’Sullivan Professor Emerita of Visual Culture (National College of Art and Design Ireland) Founding Curator of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum, Quinnipiac University August 2026 1 James Hack Tuke, Irish Distress and its Remedies: The Land Question, A Visit to Donegal and Connaught in the Spring of 1880, London, 1880, p.75. 2 Paul Henry, An Irish Portrait, London, 1951, p.69. €15,000-€20,000 (£12,820-£17,090 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot14