The location of the fair depicted here is unspecified; however, the style of the cottages would suggest its location to be Cushendun, Co. Antrim. In the 19th century the new village was transformed by Ronald McNeill, later Lord Cushendun, who commissioned architect Clough Williams-Ellis to build several distinctive residences. The Cornish style Maud cottages, so called after Lord Cushendun’s wife, were completed in 1925.

Dublin city had a special place in Harry Kernoff’s heart and, like many of his artistic contemporaries; his depictions of the Capital have become invaluable national treasures. In Saint Stephen’s Green he focuses on the historic Fusilier's Arch at the Grafton Street corner of the square. With Joyceian reverence he captures the gentle buzz of a city saturated with familiar characters, many of whom are likely to be diminutive representations of friends and local personalities. Like Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which mapped out the Capital with the meanderings of Stephen Dedalus, Kernoff’s topographical drawings of the 1900s could equally be effective in the rebuilding of Dublin city. Kindred spirits, and gifted in their respective languages, both artists sought to express the quintessence of Dublin whether it be through the eloquently expressed written word or an unassuming snap-shot. Saint Stephen’s Green was the subject of a number of works by the artist who would more often portray the goings-on inside the Green rather then a bird’s-eye view of the entrance.

For another interpretation of this location see lot 34 (HarryKernoff).

For examples of Campbell’s Spanish works see lots 56 and 58.

Gypsy Girl dates to this period and reflects the continental stimuli which must have been impressing upon him. This archetypal female character would be a subject that the artist would revisit several times throughout his career and her iconic presence manifested itself in various guises such as this one or, for example, a Young Actress, c.1945 or Flora, 1954. There is a particularly continental feel to his work which suggests his time spent in Spain. O’Neill hones in on this intriguing figure, dressing the young female in a mantilla which cascades with delicacy from her dark hair down over her shoulders. The elegant lace is given tangible fragility by O’Neill’s expert handling of the paint. The palette is typical of this period, her dark eyes and strong features are softened only by the golds and greens picked up in the girl’s earrings and reflected on her skin and clothes. O’Neill’s romantically inclined temperament lent itself to these charged canvases and, as T.P. Flanagan would later comment, “His romanticism was a delightful balance to the serenity of John Luke’s style and to brilliant but eclectic, dalliance of Colin Middleton”. By the beginning of the 1950s O’Neill would enjoy the culmination of the successes of these evocative works in his highly successful 1952 CEMA Exhibition in Belfast.

Colin Middleton had an overwhelming thirst to explore and experiment with the possibilities in painting and, although aged in his mid-forties at the time of his retrospective in the Victor Waddington Galleries Middleton's style showed no signs of consistency but rather demonstrated a feverish impatience to investigate evermore styles. External forces were constantly directing his journey and he freely offered himself as a vessel through which they could pass and assimilate. Pat Murphy in interview with Middleton in December 1980 for the Irish Times asked the artist why it was that he adopted so many styles during his career. In response Middleton revealed, “…when someone opens a door you go through it."

Thus, the forces of the 'isims' had free reign on his undecided mind. Magritte, Miró and Dalí were to prove lasting influences on his style in the 1930s and 1940s and their impact would have a lasting effect which would manifest itself in works such as, U.F.O'.s, some forty years later. Although not immediately obvious, U.F.O.'s shares a link with Middlton's prior works in that it too is rooted in the idea of place. The strata in the foreground are reminiscent of his earlier landscapes of bogs or perhaps the beaches in Newcastle Co. Down while the grainy texture of the harsh plane demonstrates a similar technique of paint application seen in Important Lady with Attendant (1976) (illustrated p.53, Eastwood). This precise execution with its polished finish and suggestion of texture is indication of the lasting effect of his time as a damask designer. The organic nature of the landscape and the idea of place and environment are balanced by the menacing presence of the smooth, structured objects suspended in the expanse of the sky.

In conversation with Ciarán Carthy (Sunday Independent) in 1980 the artist offered by way of explanation that he needed, "...an organic reference, whether it be landscape or figure" and that he saw himself as a "spiritual medium [with an] ever present conflict between reason and intuition." These veins which channelled Middleton's creativity were what marked him out as an artist. He was the Irish answer to Surrealism, opening the floodgates to audiences to explore foreign and imagined landscapes. It is perhaps interesting also to note that there are in fact records of an unidentified object sighted in Belfast in 1972. Middleton, known to react to actual events, may have been faced at this juncture in his career with an extraordinary real-life stimulus to charge his canvas with yet another conflict between reason and intuition.

As the artist’s style developed and matured, and the vista of his genre works opened out from those interiors, so characteristic of the turn-of-the century New English Art Club, to the broader canvases and challeges of the open air, the dominance given to line, increasingly gave way to colour and form, a development no doubt feulled by the awe-inspiring, ever-changing skies over Dublin Bay, which Orpen regularly painted as he holidayed in Howth between 1909 and 1914 (see footnote no. 3), and later by the strange and eerie beauty of the sun-baked battlefields of the Western Front (see footnote no. 4), and onimous billowing clouds over Paris (see footnote no. 5). Orpen exulted the incongruity of the strong yet suble, sometime contrasting, sometime harmonious, colours, that nature created in its landscapes, seascapes and cloudscapes, and in consequence his pallette developed to accommodate them. Throughout the 1920s Orpen subjugated his own freedom to explore through genre painting to concentrate on his portrait business. However, in the last few months of his life, he branched out from commissioned portraiture to produce a series of works, often unfinished, seemingly very different from anything else he produced before. Orpen’s health was failing rapidly at that time, and he must have been aware that his time was short, but he was determined to work to the very end. He still had things to say, things he had put off for a decade, things emanating from a new conciousness arising from his changing medical condition. Consequently the pictures, forged by a new urgency, do not have the finesse of previous works, but they do contain passion, vision, commitment and unity of expression. Evidently they must have meant a great deal to the artist for he submitted three of the more major pictures, Palm Sunday A.D.33 (1931) (Private Collection), Eve in the Garden of Eden (1931) (Royal Academy, London) and Pavlova on a Beach (1931) (Mildura Arts Centre, Australia), to public scrutiny at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1931.

Consisting of two intertwining strands these last works are set in an indeterminate location comprising earth, sea and sky, that may be an idealised reference to Howth and Dublin Bay, the character of which can change from idyllic sunshine to stormy turmoil in the blink of an eye. It is this duality that is reflected, with the female form representing serenity and the male form turmoil. When we gaze upon these works we are experiencing Orpen’s visualisation of the Agony and the Ecstasy, yet still the romantic is corralled by realism, as he did three decades before with The Rebel. Only now with the balance tipped in favour of the romantic. Realism was achieved by the preservation of line, and as his faculties deteriorated, the ingenious artist resorted to various subterfuges to compensate. Among these would be the use of photographs, tracing, or using old academic pencil studies of the nude and adding a background based upon colour and form, which did not require the same precision in its handling. The current work falls into this category, the figure itself could possibly be a trace of , or an earlier study. (See footnote no 6)

The quality of the works suggest Orpen was trying to aspire to some supernatural vision, as if he was looking through his own approaching death to the after-life. All the pictures possess a mystical or spiritual quality, and a number of them have a religious theme or title. Religion had taken on a greater significance in these last years. He had become friendly with a Roman Catholic priest and had installed his own little Chapel in his revamped studio completed in 1929. One could imagine, the recumbent figure representing Orpen himself, a tortured soul, as he comtemplates the haunting images of Ribera’s Christ and martyrs which had been etched in his memory all those years before. As his dexterity wanes, colour becomes increasing more important to express his feelings, and these pictures of the male nude are far darker in colour and tone than the more serene ones involving the female form. The stillness of those pictures is replaced with a disturbing sky, full of movement and menace, where even the seagulls are agitated. There is no peace here. This is more akin to purgatory than to heaven, and the man’s implied suffering may well be a manifestation of Orpen’s guilt and loathing at certain aspects of his life as he prepares to meet his Maker. Is he in purgatory, naked before God, racked by pain both mental and physical, atoning for his sins in a neverland? Taking the current work as an example, just as with Van Gogh, or Dadd, whatever governed Orpen’s thoughts in the last months, he still was able to produce powerful and challenging works, focuses for meditation, that have the ability to cause a stir, divide opinion, court controversy, shock and bewilder. As such this oft dismissed small but significant part of his ouvre should not be rejected or ignored. Instead it must be embraced, for it represents the closing bracket around the artistic life of a great painter.

Footnotes: 1. For a more detailed assessment of these works, especially The Rebel, refer to P.G. Konody’s comments in P.G. Konody and Sidney Dark, Sir William Orpen, Artist and Man, Seeley Service, London, 1932, p.158. 2 This pose adopted for the current work, or variants, can be seen in many works of neo classical, historic and romantic painters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Further examples include William Blake’s The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, c.1805-9 (Tate Gallery, London) and David Scott’s, Russians Burying their Dead, 1831-2 (Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow). Perhaps of greatest interest, however, is the latters’ 1840 rendition of Philoctetes left in the Isle of Lemnos by the Greeks, in their Passage towards Troy, which seems to have been inspired by William Wordsworth’s 1827 Sonnet, When Philoctetes in the Lemnian Isle, rather than directly from the Greek legend:

WHEN Philoctetes in the Lemnian isle Like a form sculptured on a monument Lay couched; on him or his dread bow unbent Some wild bird oft might settle and beguile The rigid features of a transient smile, Disperse the tear, or to the sigh give vent, Slackening the pains of ruthless banishment From his loved home, and from heroic toil. And trust that spiritual Creatures round us move, Griefs to allay which Reason cannot heal; Yea, veriest reptiles have sufficed to prove To fettered wretchedness, that no Bastile Is deep enough to exclude the light of love, Though man for brother man has ceased to feel.

Although viewed from a different angle, Philocetetes’ pose closely resembles the pose of the nude in the subject work. This along with the nature and placement of the accoutrements, the bow and quiver of arrows for Scott and the hat and firearn for Orpen, coupled with the similarity in the beards suggest that this may have been one of Orpen’s references when undertaking The Rebel. Scott’s painting had been acquired by the National Gallery of Scoland in 1890. It is also not inconceivable that Orpen knew that Scott’s source was Wordsworth, and that he was also conversant with the sonnet. However, whereas in The Rebel, he was using elements of Scott’s picture for a composition in relation to a different subject, with regard to the present work, the added elements surrounding the central figure, together with colour and tone of the torso suggest a direct connection with the sonnet on the one hand and a link to Scott’s work on the other. It may well be that the sentiments expressed by Wordsworth found a resonance with Orpen in his twilight days. 3 Examples include: A Breezy Day, Howth (1912) (Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin) Bringing In the Boat (c.1912) (Private Collection), and Dublin Bay From Howth Head (c.1912) (Private Collection). For further discussion see Orpen Research Project, Christie’s Irish Sale, 19 May 2000 Catalogue, Lot.184. pp.162-3, Christie’s, London, 2000. 4 Examples include: The Main Street, Combles (1917) (Imperial War Museum, London) and Harvest, 1918 (Imperial War Museum, London) 5 Clouds Over Montmartre (c.1919) (Private Collection). For further discussion see Orpen Research Project, Sotheby’s Irish Sale, 13 May 2004 Catalogue, , Lot.34. p.55., Sotheby’s, London, 2004. 6 Other works to be considered: Based on the male nude - Male Nude Study (Private Collection); On the Edge of the Cliff (Private Collection); and Nude, Male Lying on a Rock [No.1] (Private Collection), and based on the Female form - Mother and Child on a Beach (Royal Academy, London); Nude Female Model Reading on a Seashore (Royal Academy, London) ; and Nude, Female, Back - Looking to Sea (Private Collection).

Dr Denise Ferran

Footnotes: 1 William John Leech, letter from Candy Cottage to S. L. Thompson, Christchurch, New Zealand, offering consolation on learning of the death of his wife Maud Ethel Thompson and narrating the subject matter he was painting, 9 September 1961. 2 Ibid. 3 See Denise Ferran, William John Leech: An Irish Painter Abroad, Merrell Holberton, London, 1996, illustrated in colour, pages 290, 291 and 278 respectively.

Hilary Pyle in Jack Butler Yeats, His Watercolours, Drawings and Pastels sites Derelict, 1910, describing the principal subject as, "A redheaded, red-bearded seaman in patched blue clothes..." See Pyle p.164, catalogue no. 699.