IMPORTANT IRISH ART Monday 23 November 2026 from 6PM

18 Throughout his career Walter Osborne was attracted to street and market subjects - from his early years in Flanders and Brittany, in England, and then later in Dublin, Galway and Connemara. He was fascinated by scenes where people gathered together; to trade and bargain, to sell and buy their wares, or simply to gossip and pass the time. During the 1880s while spending much of the time working in England, on visits home he had painted superb street scenes with figures in Dublin, such as St. Patrick’s Close, 1887 and Dublin Street: A Vendor of Books, 1889 (both pictures in National Gallery of Ireland). In the early 1890s, after the death of his sister Violet, Osborne returned home to care for his mother, father and niece. Osborne knew the area of St. Patrick’s well, and had painted an interior of the cathedral. But, as Jeanne Sheehy asserts in her biography of the artist, “In the nineties Osborne worked a lot in the market area of Dublin around Chrish Church and St. Patrick’s…”.1 Here he made a large number of studies of street scenes in pencil, watercolour, pastel and oil, featuring figures of women and children, old shop fronts, and stalls filled with wares. As Sheehy writes: “The Dublin market pictures of the nineties…show a greater interest in people, more involvement in their lives, than most of Osborne’s early work”.2 Perhaps the most impressive and moving of all such paintings is The Fish Market, Patrick Street, also known as Life in the Streets, Musicians, 1893 (Hugh Lane Gallery).3 In contrast to the sunshine and colour of his Breton market subjects, Osborne’s Dublin scenes are quite sombre and earthy in tone, partially refelecting the overcast weather in Ireland, and the rudimentary shop fronts and stalls, but also symbolising the poverty and bleakness of the residents of this part of Dublin. Yet, A Bit of Old Dublin, although of a brown and umber tonality, sparkles with touches of blue, white and pink. The picture is crowded with figures, about fourteen women, stallholders, children, infants, shoppers and passers-by, and the presence of a donkey on the right-hand side gives a friendly rustic touch. The figure of the beshawled young woman with baby, standing to the left; the girl peeping out of the doorway, and the barefoot boy walking to the right of the picture, are archetypal characters in Osborne’s pictures. The woman with a black bonnet behind a stall in the centre of the composition may be a more well-to-do shopper. It is clear that Osborne has based many of the people of preliminary studies and fitted them together into an ensemble. This gives a light, ‘floating’ look to some of the figures. The white tablecloth with vessels, the shawl of the baby and the boots on the ground, provide a striking contract to the overall muted tones of the picture. In the upper right-hand side, the letters above a shop front, perhaps ‘…33, Patrick’… are visible. Osborne often gave simple, descriptive titles to his pictures, so the title of the pastel, A Bit of Old Dublin has a more wistful touch conveying his affection for the old working-class areas of the city, shared with his friend, fellow painter Joseph Malachy Kavanagh. The picture is of quite large dimensions for a pastel, as big as several of Osborne’s major oils on canvas. Indeed, so skillful and deft is the artist’s touch with pastel that it is almost as if he is painting with oil on canvas. A Bit of Old Dublin was exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1891 and later that year at the Autumn Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Julian Campbell, October 2026. 1 Jeanne Sheehy, Walter Osborne, Ballycotton, 1974, P.37 2 Jeanne Sheehy, Walter Osborne, National Gallery of Ireland, 1983, p.96 3 See J. Sheehy, 1974, J. Sheehy, 1983 and Homecoming, Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin, ed. Cheryl K. Snay & Judith Stapleton, Rachlin Murphy Museum of art, University of Notre Dame, 2005