Aloysius C. O’Kelly (1853-1936)EDMOND O`DONOVAN AS AN ORIENTAL, c.1883-84watercolour over pencil

Aloysius C. O’Kelly (1853-1936)

EDMOND O`DONOVAN AS AN ORIENTAL, c.1883-84

watercolour over pencil heightened with body colour on laid paper

signed lower right; with Hugh Lane exhibition label on reverse

Portrait

22.25 by 16in., 55.625 by 40cm.

The Collection of Mervyn & Pat Solomon

`Aloysius O`Kelly, Re-Orientations, Paintings, Politics and Popular Culture`, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 25 November 1999 to 30 January 2000

O`Sullivan, Niamh, Aloysius O`Kelly, Re-Orientations, Paintings, Politics and Popular Culture, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1999, p.72 -73 (full page illustration p.72)

A graduate of Belvedere and later Trinity College, Edmond O`Donovan was sworn into the Fenians by O`Donovan Rossa. After a failed uprising in 1867 he fled to Paris. He joined the Foreign Legion at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian in 1870. Wounded and taken prisoner, he was shipped back to Ireland in May 1871. When he was home in Ireland he spent his time trying to revitalise the Fenian movement while also reporting on the Balkan War for the Daily News. His time as a correspondent came to a tragic end when he disappeared in the Sudan during the Mahdi uprising in 1883.Aloysius O`Kelly (1853-1936) was born in Dublin as Aloysius Kelly, and immigrated to London in 1861, where he adopted the prefix O`. O`Kelly belonged to a Fenian family. His older brothers, James, Charles and Stephen, were all Fenians, and sculptors (trained by their uncle, John Lawlor, the well-known Irish sculptor in London). O`Kelly lived a life of art and sedition, operating as a painter and activist in Ireland, Britain, France and the United States, as well as in outposts of the empire, such as Sudan and Egypt. His connections to the shadowy world of Irish republican politics permeated his work. Aloysius was closest to James, who was instrumental in building up the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Britain, was active in the Land League, was elected Member of Parliament for Roscommon in 1880 and a key figure in securing Charles Stewart Parnell`s agreement for the New Departure. The most radical Irish artist of his era, O`Kelly was prolific and eclectic: Realist in Ireland, Naturalist in France and Orientalist in North Africa, forging all the time new connections between art and anti-colonial politics.O`Kelly was accepted by the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1874, to the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), a not inconsequential achievement. He also studied with the portraitist, Joseph-Florentin-Léon Bonnat (1833-1922). He was one of the first Irish artists to go to Brittany, to Pont-Aven, and later Corncarneau. There he mixed with the American colony blending academic, realist and plein-air elements into an innovative mode of rural Naturalism. From France, O`Kelly returned to Ireland in the early 1880s, as `Special Artist` to The Illustrated London News, giving visual expression to the harsh realities of Irish rural life. Here the Freeman`s Journal declared him `the most important of modern artists`, and of `exceptionally high rank` (2 June 1888). His Mass in a Connemara Cabin (National Gallery of Ireland, 1883) had the distinction of being the first painting of an Irish subject ever exhibited in the Paris Salon. In North Africa, O`Kelly painted many typical scenes, but tended to avoid the emblems of Orientalism, scenes of extremism and characterisations of incompetence that might justify colonial domination. His North African and Middle Eastern paintings reveal a predominantly ethnographic interest. His adoption of the name Oakley in Cairo also points to political activism, leading to a dangerous adventure in which he and his brother, James, followed their friend, Edmond O`Donovan, the Fenian and internationally renowned journalist, to Sudan in 1883/4, where they allied themselves with the forces of the Mahdi. As well as being a work of artistic merit, the wa