Description
Daniel O'Neill (1920-1974) HORSEMAN PASS BY signed lower right; inscribed on reverse oil on board 51 by 69cm., 20 by 27in. Provenance Purchased from the artist in 1971 by George and Maura McClelland; Sold privately circa 1980; 'The Irish Sale', Sotheby's, 21 May 1999, lot 365; Private collection Exhibited: 'Daniel O'Neill: Recent Paintings', Dawson Gallery, Dublin, 12-31 May 1971 Literature: Gena Lynam, 'Daniel O'Neill (1920-1974): Landscape and Figure Painter', Irish Arts Review, Volume 15, 1999, page 141 Daniel O'Neill began to paint in the early 1940s when World War II and the 1941 Blitz of Belfast were taking place. He had followed his father's trade as an electrician and worked night shifts with Belfast Corporation and, later, at the Belfast shipyard, which allowed him to paint at home by day. He maintained this gruelling schedule until 1945 when, at the age of 25, he received a gallery contract from Victor Waddington, which allowed him to paint full-time. The variety, quantity and quality of the work produced during this period suggests a painter restlessly pursuing his ideas with the intensity of one relieved from the need to earn a living by more mundane means. O'Neill was now free to give everything to his passion for painting. He first exhibited in Dublin in a joint exhibition with Gerard Dillon, at the Contemporary Painters Gallery, Lower Baggot Street, in 1943, and from then on, annually, at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and at the RHA. His first one man show was held at the Waddington Galleries in 1946 and, later that year he participated in an exhibition entitled Four Northern Painters, also at Waddington's, with Dillon, George Campbell and Nevill Johnson. These artists formed the nucleus of a group of painters who represented Ireland abroad in group shows held in Los Angeles, New York and Boston, as well as London and Amsterdam, over the next decade O'Neill's 1952 retrospective, sponsored by CEMA (the Arts Council of the day), which was held at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, attracted record attendances and helped establish his reputation as an important painter. This was a remarkable achievement for one largely self-taught, and who had been painting professionally for barely ten years. When asked, "What do you paint?" O'Neill would reply that he painted people in landscapes and landscapes with people in them. However, as can be seen from any survey of his work, he also dealt with the eternal themes of birth and death and what it feels like to be a human being in a hostile environment. Liam Kelly refers to the duality of the comic/tragic Pierrot figures in the work of Dillon and O'Neill, and to "the imaginative, often haunting, melancholic, interaction between figure and environment, mood and circumstance"1. Of course O'Neill was not primarily interested in the landscape in itself, but rather used the environment as a symbolic backdrop to the concerns and dreams of the figures that inhabit it. O'Neill moved to London in 1958 and although he continued to visit Belfast regularly, his work was rarely seen in Ireland during the following years as most of his output was channelled through the Waddington Galleries in Montreal. However, there were two very successful exhibitions of his work at the Dawson Gallery in 1960 and again in1963. Encouraged by George McClelland, O'Neill returned permanently to Belfast in 1970. McClelland in turn organized O'Neill's first exhibition in Belfast for eighteen years, which was held at the McClelland Gallery. This was followed by an exhibition at the Dawson Gallery, which opened on 12th May 1971. Horseman Pass By was one of thirty-two works exhibited. Desmond MacAvock, art critic with The Irish Times, reviewed the show and noted that O'Neill had always shown the greatest consistency of manner, style and subject matter of the "Belfast School of Contemporary painting"2. He found the exhibition to be a "maturing of his vision and its treatment" and concluded that while O'Neill had been "content to cultivate a small, perhaps claustrophobic garden ... he has made it yield very considerable fruits, luscious and soft, full of pleasure and delight" 3. The exhibition was also reviewed by The Irish Press where the fairy tale quality of Horseman Pass By was noted among other works, for "atmosphere and mystery" 4. The title Horseman Pass By is taken from W.B. Yeats' poem Under Ben Bulben, of which the following lines in turn constituted the poet's own epitaph: "No marble no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death Horseman, pass by!" Like Yeats, O'Neill may also have had his own mortality in mind when he painted the work, inspired by concerns about his health. Another work painted about this time, The Sisters - A Dream (recently shown at the 2004/2005 IMMA Hunter Gatherer exhibition) was inspired by a premonition of his own death, which he claimed had come to him in a dream. The painting Horseman Pass By may also, of course, reflect a concern for the wellbeing of his native city, which was, at that time riven by communal strife. When O'Neill returned there in 1970 he was distressed by the devastation as can be seen in his works Belfast After the Riot and Belfast Expo 70, where bombed out vehicles are set against a frieze of ruined dwellings. The iconography of the white charger of King William III is one of the most potent Ulster symbols. The mounted rider is clearly O'Neill, being led away from the city by the muse: retreating, perhaps, to the more enchanted kingdom of his imagination. Anne Marie Keaveney, Artist, Lecturer, National College of Art and Design, Dublin The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of the following people who granted her interviews: T. P. Flanagan (8 December1998), Eileen O'Neill Triber (13 February 1999) and Maureen O'Neill (19 July 1999). 1 Liam Kelly, Thinking Long - Contemporary art in Northern Ireland, Gandon Editions, Kinsale, 1996. 2 The Irish Times, 17 May 1971. 3 Ibid. 4 The Irish Press, 14 May 1971.
