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Daniel O'Neill LANDSCAPE
Lot 32
Result: Not Sold
Estimate: €15,000 - €25,000
Daniel O'Neill, 1920-1974 LANDSCAPE Oil on board, 14" x 21" (35.3 x 53.3cm), signed. Born in Belfast in 1920, Daniel O'Neill began his working life as an apprentice electrician in the Belfast shipyards, and as a housepainter. A tentative... Read more
Lot 32 - LANDSCAPE by Daniel O'Neill Lot 32 Daniel O'Neill LANDSCAPE
Estimate: €15,000 - €25,000
Daniel O'Neill, 1920-1974
LANDSCAPE
Oil on board, 14" x 21" (35.3 x 53.3cm), signed.

Born in Belfast in 1920, Daniel O'Neill began his working life as an apprentice electrician in the Belfast shipyards, and as a housepainter. A tentative interest in art was nurtured through life classes at the Belfast School of Art, where he first became friends with Gerard Dillon. From 1941, he was contributing to group exhibitions in Belfast, and from 1943, in Dublin, where he exhibited at the Contemporary Picture Galleries with Dillon. O'Neill's break as a professional artist came in 1945 when he joined the Victor Waddington Galleries, where he was paid in art materials and a monthly stipend, in return for the gallerist having first refusal on sales. O'Neill, along with Dillon, George Campbell, and Arthur Armstrong, were part of a rising generation of Northern Irish artists in the 1940s and 1950s, encouraged by collectors such as Zoltan Lewinter-Frankl, poet John Hewitt, and venues such the Ulster Museum and the CEMA Gallery, Belfast.

In 1948 O'Neill visited Paris where in addition to seeing works by the Impressionist painters, he was particularly drawn to the Fauvist paintings of Maurice de Vlaminck and Utrillo. In many respects the colouring of the present work recalls the richness of the Fauves, along with their frenetic brushwork. Depicting the rural Irish landscape, this painting is redolent of his other depictions of the Ulster countryside, such as Tyrella in Down, and Knockalla, Donegal.  Artist T. P. Flanagan would later describe how O'Neill 'decorated his pictures as if bestowing a gift of jewellery, an effect of richness further enhanced by a taste for flooding thin glazes of yellow or amber over the white impasto.'[1]The present work is made striking by the bold use of yellow, drawing the eye from the busy foreground, through to the crop-filled fields, and the glimmering sunshine overhead. The view is framed by two young trees in full leaf, the colourful roofs and white walls of three cottages the only sign of human activity in the landscape. Touches of orange-red contrast with this, giving the painting a feeling of warm summer sunshine.

Dr Kathryn Milligan, May 2023

[1] T. P. Flanagan, 'A gift of jewellery', Daniel O'Neill: A Fortnight Educational Trust Supplement (1992), 2.
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