Walter Frederick Osborne RHA (1859-1903) In Galway Town (c.1893) Oil on canvas...
Walter Frederick Osborne RHA (1859-1903)
In Galway Town (c.1893)
Oil on canvas laid on board 18.5 x 27.5cm (7¼ x 10¾")
Signed
Provenance: Robert Crewe-Milnes (1858-1945), by descent to Mary, Duchess...
Walter Frederick Osborne RHA (1859-1903)
In Galway Town (c.1893)
Oil on canvas laid on board 18.5 x 27.5cm (7¼ x 10¾")
Signed
Provenance: Robert Crewe-Milnes (1858-1945), by descent to Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe, her estate sale, Sotheby’s 27/05/2015, lot 112 (as Fish Market, Galway); Private Collection, Ireland
Exhibited: London, Institute of Painters in Oil Colours, 1893/4, cat.no.9; Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 1894, no.229; Indiana, Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin, 1880-1900, cat.no.26, illustrated. p.153
Literature: Irish Daily Independent, 12 March 1894, reported In Galway Town bought by Lord Lieutenant, Lord Haughton (later Earl of Crewe) at RHA; J. Sheehy, Walter Osborne, Ballycotton,1974, no.375; Julian Campbell, Walter Osborne in the West of Ireland, Adam’s 2004, cat. No.15; Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin, 1880-1900, p.152/153. (A copy of this publication is included with the present lot)
In Galway Town was painted in September 1893 during Osborne’s third, and arguably most productive excursion to Connemara. Shortly after he returned, he was visited by his friend and brother painter Dermod O’Brien (PRHA) who reported to his family that he had ‘looked in at Walter Osborne’s studio’ noting that ‘He has some very jolly sketches he made in Galway’.1
It is doubtful, however, that the present work was amongst them. Convinced of its merits, Osborne appears to have despatched it to London for exhibition with the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours, of which he was a member. Reviewers of the exhibition observed that, in his Galway pictures, ‘Mr Walter Osborne’ had ‘been particularly successful in the rendering of a soft grey atmosphere, so distinctly Irish in character,’ and deemed ‘eminently typical too…his groups of market women which, with their welcome touches of colour relieve[d] the somewhat poverty stricken aspect of the place.’2
Whilst working out-of-doors in the west of Ireland, Osborne had to contend with the constraints of time, mercurial weather, and, if Stephen Gwynn’s account is to be relied upon, hostile models in the shape of the fisherwomen of the Claddagh. However, it was precisely under such conditions that he thrived; having no recourse to deliberate over his marks in the moment, he worked decisively and instinctively, resulting in paintings of remarkable freshness and vitality.
Earlier that year, Osborne’s work hung side by side with French Impressionists Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Claude Monet at the New English Art’s spring exhibition, and it is worth considering the breadth of handling, or as Dermod O’Brien put it, the ‘jolly freedom’ of his Galway paintings, executed shortly thereafter in that context. However, as his earliest market scenes demonstrate, he had long been possessed of a suggestive touch and throughout the 1880s and early 1890s had been consciously cultivating his own impressionistic idiom.
The factors governing Osborne’s decision to trade the manicured picturesqueness of England’s Home Counties for, as Oscar Wilde put it, the savage beauty of Connemara, are as innumerable as they are complex. However, one of the simplest and most compelling reasons was its appeal to his sense of colour. The Claddagh women were famed for their ‘bright red petticoats…their cloaks worn like a Spanish mantilla, and of diverse colours, their handkerchiefs and hoods’ which, when offset against ‘the old grey ruins where the fish market is held… formed a tableau not to be forgotten’; indeed, In Galway Town could almost have been painted on foot of such a description.3
Although Osborne’s exploration of the visual possibilities of Galway’s Spanish Parade, with its symphony of lyrical greys and judicious punctuation of notes of pure vibrant colour, owes much to Whistler, he has in this instance equalled, if not surpassed him.
Gearóid Arthur Hayes, 2026.
1Dermod O’Brien to Julia Mary O’Brien. Letter. 25 November 1893. National Library of Ireland.
2‘Illustrated News,’ Cumberland and Westmorland Advertiser, 6 November 1894.
3Samuel Reynolds Hole, A Little Tour of Ireland (New York: W S Gottsberger & Co., 1891), 39.
Walter Frederick Osborne RHA (1859-1903)
In Galway Town (c.1893)
Oil on canvas laid on board 18.5 x 27.5cm (7¼ x 10¾")
Signed
Provenance: Robert Crewe-Milnes (1858-1945), by descent to Mary, Duchess...
Walter Frederick Osborne RHA (1859-1903)
In Galway Town (c.1893)
Oil on canvas laid on board 18.5 x 27.5cm (7¼ x 10¾")
Signed
Provenance: Robert Crewe-Milnes (1858-1945), by descent to Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe, her estate sale, Sotheby’s 27/05/2015, lot 112 (as Fish Market, Galway); Private Collection, Ireland
Exhibited: London, Institute of Painters in Oil Colours, 1893/4, cat.no.9; Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 1894, no.229; Indiana, Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin, 1880-1900, cat.no.26, illustrated. p.153
Literature: Irish Daily Independent, 12 March 1894, reported In Galway Town bought by Lord Lieutenant, Lord Haughton (later Earl of Crewe) at RHA; J. Sheehy, Walter Osborne, Ballycotton,1974, no.375; Julian Campbell, Walter Osborne in the West of Ireland, Adam’s 2004, cat. No.15; Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin, 1880-1900, p.152/153. (A copy of this publication is included with the present lot)
In Galway Town was painted in September 1893 during Osborne’s third, and arguably most productive excursion to Connemara. Shortly after he returned, he was visited by his friend and brother painter Dermod O’Brien (PRHA) who reported to his family that he had ‘looked in at Walter Osborne’s studio’ noting that ‘He has some very jolly sketches he made in Galway’.1
It is doubtful, however, that the present work was amongst them. Convinced of its merits, Osborne appears to have despatched it to London for exhibition with the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours, of which he was a member. Reviewers of the exhibition observed that, in his Galway pictures, ‘Mr Walter Osborne’ had ‘been particularly successful in the rendering of a soft grey atmosphere, so distinctly Irish in character,’ and deemed ‘eminently typical too…his groups of market women which, with their welcome touches of colour relieve[d] the somewhat poverty stricken aspect of the place.’2
Whilst working out-of-doors in the west of Ireland, Osborne had to contend with the constraints of time, mercurial weather, and, if Stephen Gwynn’s account is to be relied upon, hostile models in the shape of the fisherwomen of the Claddagh. However, it was precisely under such conditions that he thrived; having no recourse to deliberate over his marks in the moment, he worked decisively and instinctively, resulting in paintings of remarkable freshness and vitality.
Earlier that year, Osborne’s work hung side by side with French Impressionists Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Claude Monet at the New English Art’s spring exhibition, and it is worth considering the breadth of handling, or as Dermod O’Brien put it, the ‘jolly freedom’ of his Galway paintings, executed shortly thereafter in that context. However, as his earliest market scenes demonstrate, he had long been possessed of a suggestive touch and throughout the 1880s and early 1890s had been consciously cultivating his own impressionistic idiom.
The factors governing Osborne’s decision to trade the manicured picturesqueness of England’s Home Counties for, as Oscar Wilde put it, the savage beauty of Connemara, are as innumerable as they are complex. However, one of the simplest and most compelling reasons was its appeal to his sense of colour. The Claddagh women were famed for their ‘bright red petticoats…their cloaks worn like a Spanish mantilla, and of diverse colours, their handkerchiefs and hoods’ which, when offset against ‘the old grey ruins where the fish market is held… formed a tableau not to be forgotten’; indeed, In Galway Town could almost have been painted on foot of such a description.3
Although Osborne’s exploration of the visual possibilities of Galway’s Spanish Parade, with its symphony of lyrical greys and judicious punctuation of notes of pure vibrant colour, owes much to Whistler, he has in this instance equalled, if not surpassed him.
Gearóid Arthur Hayes, 2026.
1Dermod O’Brien to Julia Mary O’Brien. Letter. 25 November 1893. National Library of Ireland.
2‘Illustrated News,’ Cumberland and Westmorland Advertiser, 6 November 1894.
3Samuel Reynolds Hole, A Little Tour of Ireland (New York: W S Gottsberger & Co., 1891), 39.
