Lot 14A: Walter Frederick Osborne RHA ROI (1859-1903) THE VILLAGE STREET, RUSH & LUSK, COUNTY DUBLIN, c.1898

signed lower left

h:7.25 w:10.75in.

oil on canvas laid on board

'Memorial Exhibition of the works of Walter Osborne', Royal Hibernian Academy, Winter 1903-04, catalogue no. 145 (Lent by George Brooke, Bart.)

Sheehy, Jeanne, Walter Osborne, Gifford & Craven, Ballycotton, Cork, 1974, p.144, catalogue no. 498 (listed)

Collection of Sir George F. Brooke, Bart;
Thence by descent to Lady Brooke;
with Mealy's, Castlecomer, May 1991, lot 1028;
Private collection;
Whyte's, 25 November 2013, lot 29;
Private collection

Walter Osborne's passion for painting en plein air is thought to have been the cause of his premature death in an unusually cold April in 1903. He was forty-three and at the height of his artistic powers. The present work, which dates to the most prolific period in his oeuvre, is testament to this passion and captures the rustic charm of a village street in half-light in North County Dublin.

The scene is an intimate view of an ordinary street where the everyday humdrum of village life is taking place. Fowl peck at the dirt in the centre of the road by a water pump while a figure with a cart stops and engages with another in a doorway on the left. This scene appears to repeat itself further down the street on the opposite side of the road where hints of figures and animals are suggested. Osborne elevates the routine happenings of village life to the level of the extraordinary by seeing beauty in its simplicity and communicating this to the viewer in an honest vocabulary that draws on the Realist's in subject, tone and palette and the Impressionist's in execution and responsiveness to light.

Osborne's brushstrokes are deceptively simple. The fowl in the centre are delivered to the viewer by a mere dab of the paint-brush; a single, fluid and bold movement that is unassumingly brilliant. They lift out of the canvas in delicate impasto that invite the eye into the composition. The flatter façades of the buildings lining the street draw the viewer towards the brightest corner of the street, treating us to insights into village life on route. The glow that radiates from this point touches road and wall until resting back in the foreground in the fowl's plumage.

A charged, powerful and unpretentious painting, The Village Street, Rush & Lusk formed part of a large memorial exhibition held at the RHA, Dublin after Osborne's death. It was one of 270 paintings and drawings loaned mostly from private collections. The present example was owned at that time by a wine merchant based on Gardiner's Row, Dublin. 1

Footnote:
1. Brooke, George F., 1 Gardiner's Row (wine merchant) [ex Dublin City Directory 1850]