110

Seán O’Casey (1880-1964) RIVER LANDSCAPE signed an

Currency:EUR Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:4,000.00 - 6,000.00 EUR
Seán O’Casey (1880-1964) RIVER LANDSCAPE signed an

Bidding Over

The auction is over for this lot.
The auctioneer wasn't accepting online bids for this lot.

Contact the auctioneer for information on the auction results.

Search for other lots to bid on...
Auction Date:2005 Feb 22 @ 18:00 (UTC)
Location:Ireland
Seán O’Casey (1880-1964) RIVER LANDSCAPE signed and dated [1898] lower right; inscribed by the artist’s son, Breon O’Casey, on reverse watercolour over pencil on paper 41 by 28cm., 16 by 11in. Provenance: Tom Glazier, friend of Seán O’Casey’s, Bristol; By whom given to the mother of the present owner Exhibited: Dublin Civic Museum, circa 1992 (photographs of exhibition included with lot) Literature: Christopher Murray, Seán O’Casey: Writer at Work - A Biography, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 2004, pp. 61-62 and illustrated plate 1 In a recently published biography of Irish playwright Seán O’Casey, his early artistic endeavours are discussed in some detail: “Among his many early interests was painting. He was remembered as ‘a young man very good at sketching’... All through his life he maintained this ability to draw quick and accurate sketches, cartoons, usually satirical. Later he also painted scenes on postcards which he sent to friends. He had a good eye for art and read about it assiduously, starting with Ruskin’s books... Speaking of himself in the third person, he describes in his autobiographies how he would look ‘prayerfully’ in the window of an arts supply shop in Dawson Street, ‘his eyes ravished with the water-colours displayed there; at the brushes, thin and delicate; the piled-up boxes of paints of every sort and size; the pyramids of tubes filled with glowing colours’” (Murray op. cit., p. 61). Murray also records that as a young man O’Casey (then known as John rather than Seán) purchased a book of reproductions of Constable’s paintings. He goes on to discuss the present work: “Recently a watercolour has come to light, signed ‘John Casey’ and dated 1898. Could it be by the youth with the small box of paints? Its owner believes so, although as the provenance is unclear it is difficult to be sure. The scene is a landscape, with a placid enough river with ‘sunny nooks making the green shades greener’. Could he have done it under the influence of Constable? It is possible. He would have been eighteen at the time” (p. 62). O’Casey’s painting career was to be short-lived. His family were unable to afford the formal training necessary for him to paint professionally, and as Murray concludes, “the interest in art, passionate though it was, was destined to be subordinated to the interest in drama” (p. 61).