Dermod O'Brien PRHA (1865-1945)
Heading the Stooks (1923)
Oil on canvas, 75 x 101cm (29½ x 39¾'')
Signed

Provenance: The artist's son, Dr. & Mrs. Brendan OBrien, thence by descent, then...

Dermod O'Brien PRHA (1865-1945)
Heading the Stooks (1923)
Oil on canvas, 75 x 101cm (29½ x 39¾'')
Signed

Provenance: The artist's son, Dr. & Mrs. Brendan OBrien, thence by descent, then sold de Veres, Dublin, 25 November 2003, Catalogue No.23, where purchased by present owners.

Heading the Stookswas placed on loan by the OBrien family to the Irish Agricultural Wholesale Society, of which Dermod OBrien was for a time Vice President.

 

Exhibited:Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 1913, Catalogue No.1;

Royal Scottish Academy, 1915; Boston, Massachusetts (label verso);

Cork ROSC ,'Irish Art 1900-1950', December 1975/ January 1976, Catalogue No.102, where lent by the artist's son Dr. Brendan O'Brien.

 

Dermod OBrien was one of the foremost painters in Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also the longest serving President of the Royal Hibernian Academy, from 1910 until his death in 1945. His early landscapes, like'Sheep Shearing', c.1901 (Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane), or'The Sand Pit', 1908 (Pyms Gallery, London, and thence by descent), were mostly painted at Cahirmoyle, and have a formality, a feeling of being a set piece, which continues in his work into the 1920s and beyond. Thereafter his canvases often became smaller in size with an increasing ease and spontaneity of execution that reflects his innate love of the countryside. Indeed, writing to his stepmother many years earlier, while on a social visit to London, he commented that all the fizz of the city, as he put it, isnt worth a day in the country at this time of year. Thomas MacGreevy clearly agreed with OBrien (Fifty Years of Irish Painting,,Capuchin Annual,1949, p.503) when he wrote that OBrien was a landscape painter of invariable accomplishment and as time goes on it will be realized that he had a peculiar gift for stamping the natural scene with some quality of Irishness that is not a matter of mere accessories such as boreens, bawns, and thatched white-washed cabins, but of sensitivity to the unique clarity of the Irish atmosphere.

 

At a time when portraiture was the object of most painters determination OBrienwho of course painted numerous portraitshad a natural preference for the landscape. The setting for'Heading the Stooks'is almost certainly the OBrien family estate at Cahirmoyle in County Limerick, where the artist spent much of his youth and where he lived with his wife on and off from 1914 until he sold the property, in 1919. The following year he settled in Dublin.

 

The composition in'Heading the Stooks', as is usual with OBrien, is taut, the paint having been applied with deliberation and careful consideration, nothing being left to chance. Overall the emphasis in the scene is on the landscape and only later does ones attention focus of the work going on.

Dr S.B. Kennedy

 

Dr S.B. Kennedy is presently researching the life and career of Dermod OBrien and would be glad tohear from anyone who may have information about the artist. He can be contacted through Adams.'Heading the Stooks'is included in Kennedys listing of OBriens works.

 

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