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Seán Keating PRHA HRA HRSA (1889-1977) MAN LEANING

Currency:EUR Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:20,000.00 - 30,000.00 EUR
Seán Keating PRHA HRA HRSA (1889-1977) MAN LEANING

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Auction Date:2005 Feb 22 @ 18:00 (UTC)
Location:Ireland
Seán Keating PRHA HRA HRSA (1889-1977) MAN LEANING ON A CAPITAL, circa 1947-1955 signed lower left; signed again in Irish (“Céitínn”) on reverse oil on canvas 56 by 69cm., 22 by 27in. As outlined in the note to lot 42, Keating travelled with Irish Shipping Ltd on two occasions, 1947 and again in 1948, journeying around the coast of Spain to Tunisia in north Africa. The building portrayed in the background to both works (lots 42 and 45) is evidently the same, and was most probably encountered on one of these voyages. Man Leaning on a Capital seems to have been a commissioned work, given the high finish of the painting. He is clothed in what appears to be typical Mediterranean wear, in order to stay cool in what is obviously, given Keating’s use of colour, intense heat. Keating has posed the man in front of a typical Spanish hacienda, his apparent importance suggested in three ways: his portrait, although shaded by a hat, is highly finished. Secondly, his gaze does not connect with the viewer, a device used since the Renaissance to denote the social importance and significance of a model. Lastly, the man leans on a partial Corinthian carved pillar1. This pillar is not part of the landscape of the mission house and farm, rather it is a device borrowed from ancient antiquity, more specifically, ancient Greece, where the Corinthian column or order was associated with the gods of regeneration, recovery, resurrection and health. In more recent times, the use of the Corinthian column at an entrance to a building signifies its importance, while its use as a resting place in this image seems to suggest that the man in question is a person of significance. Although the identity of the man is uncertain, it is fascinating to think he may have been Keating’s host in North Africa. Maybe, as the proud owner of the hacienda, now associated through the use of the Corinthian column with ‘regeneration, recovery, resurrection and health’, it was he who provided the cigarillo and water or wine with which Keating poses in lot 42. 1 Keating uses this device reasonably frequently throughout his career, in paintings such as Blessed be Wine (1933, illustrated in the 1989 RHA retrospective catalogue) and Saint Gabriel Possenti and Saint Paul of the Cross (1944, the Graan Monastery, Enniskillen). Eimear O’Connor, January 2005 Postgraduate Researcher Currently writing a thesis titled: Seán Keating, A New Perspective, University College, Dublin