daniel o' neill (1920-1974): landscape and figure painter

Irish Arts Review

Daniel O' Neill (1920-1974): Landscape and Figure PainterAuthor(s): Gena LynamSource: Irish Arts Review Yearbook, Vol. 15 (1999), pp. 134-141Published by: Irish Arts ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20493054 .

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DANIEL 0 NEILL (1920-1974) LANDSCAPE AND FIGURE PAINTER

1. Dan O'NEILL (1920-74): Knockalla Hills. 1951. Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 60.9 cm. (Ulster Museum, Belfast). Painted on one of O'Neill's visits to the area around

Rathmullen in Donegal, the picture is in striking contrast to the naturalistic renderings of the Irish landscape produced by O'Neill's contemporaries.

Daniel O'Neill was born in Belfast in 1920. His father was an electri

cian who had worked his trade in

Philadelphia and he had two younger sisters, one of whom died at a very

young age, but he was to remain close to

his surviving sister, Bridie, throughout his life. The family lived in a small terraced house at 4 Dimsdale

Street and Dan was educated at St John's Public Elementary

School in Clonard Street. Mercy Hunter wrote of O' Neill that 'while other children light-heartedly drew cowboys and Indians,

he was intensely serious and painted lofty castles defended by knights in shining armour and, instead of drawing inanimate objects, he always wanted to draw from life." O'Neill was pas

sionately interested in art and haunted public libraries in order to read about the subject and to study reproductions of the

Italian primitives and the Old Masters. He trained as an electrical engineer and, although he took a few elementary classes at the Art Department of the Belfast College of Technology, he was effectively self-taught as an artist.

As an electrician in the Belfast

Corporation Transport Department, O' Neill chose the night shift. When work finished, he would go home and paint 'until I

felt too tired to continue';2 he would then sleep, paint again, and

return to work. Dan's friends at this time included the artists,

Gerard Dillon, George Campbell, Arthur Armstrong, and James McIntyre. He and his friends would gather to talk about art in

Campbell's Coffee Shop opposite the City Hall. Through these discussions, O'Neill became aware of such painters as Rouault,

Munch, Matisse, Rousseau, and Picasso. In 1940, a year after he

Gena Lynam summarises the career of a

Belfast artist

1 3 4

IRISH ARTS REVIEW



2. Dan O'NEILL: Place du Terte, Paris. 1949. Oil on canvas, 64 x 76.7 cm. (Ulster Museum, Belfast). 0' Neill has 'captured the mood and atmosphere of night-life in Bohemian Paris which was perfectly suited to his familiar nostalgia...'

3. Dan O'NEILL: The First Bom. 1949. Ol on canvas,

60.7 x 50.7 cm. (Ulster Museum, Belfast). This is probably a portrait of the artist's wife, Eileen, and

their only child, Patricia. By this stage, O' Neill was already successful.

4. Dan QNEILL: Donegal Couple. Undated. Oil on canvas, 61 x 53 cm. (Collection George and

Maura McClelland). This is a self-portrait of the artist with his wife. ONeill's heavy bouts of drinking put a

strain on their marriage which eventually ended in divorce in 1960.

5. Dan ONEILL. Haleen. Undated. Oil on board, 61 x 53 cm. (Collection George and Maura

McClelland). O'Neill's first one-man show, at the Waddington Gallery in Dublin in 1946, was a great

success and brought him critical acclaim as well as considerable sales.

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6. Dan O'Neill: Figures in a Landscape. Undated. Oil on board, 46 x 61 cm. (Collection George and Maura McClelland). O'Neill's work was influenced by the French rococo painter, Watteau, who specialised in this type of idyllic festive landscape.

7.DnOlIL h laes 93 i nbad 5x5 m Cleto eog n ar cllad.TeIihTmso 5My15 die 'el'

adeptess t cathing'...te had cod briliane of oonlght'

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DANIEL O' NEILL (1920-1974): LANDSCAPE AND FIGURE PAINTER

8. Dan O'NEILL: Birth. 1952. Oil on canvas, 53.3 x 61 cm. (Arts Council of Northern Ireland). The limited range of colours convey a sense of drama and the forlorn child who stares out of the canvas, isolated from the proceedings, gives an autobiographical suggestion to the picture.

first started oil painting, O'Neill took part in his first group show at a frame-maker's in Belfast called Mol's Gallery. He sold none

of the eleven works but he nonetheless continued painting. Canvas, however, was expensive during the war years so he

experimented with different supports such as plywood, card board, greaseproof paper, and even tablecloths and bookboards. As there were no formal galleries in Belfast at that time, he

exhibited with his friends in places such as shoe shops and even

once in a shop which sold balls of wool.

In December 1943, he exhibited with Gerard Dillon at the Contemporary Picture Galleries in Dublin (Fig 13). The exhibi tion was opened by the architect, Michael Scott, and O'Neill

sold two paintings. Dillon had retumed from London where he had been working as a house-painter and was now living in

Belfast. O' Neill and Dillon shared similar backgrounds and they

were both ambitious painters at a time when there was little

demand for art in war-tom Belfast. They painted together and

tried to sell their work, but with little success. Magee's Gallery opened in Donegal Square West in Belfast

around this time. One day, O'Neill went in to look around and,

on being approached by the owner, John Magee, he showed him

a painting which he had in a parcel under his arm. Magee

showed no interest at all in the work and proceeded to tum out

the gallery lights. O'Neill reacted despairingly to such indiffer ence; he walked out onto the street, took the painting out of its

wrapping and, holding it upright on the pavement, kicked his foot right through it.3 His artist friend, James McIntyre, recalls

that he then marched back to Magee's having lifted up all the

broken bits and banged them down on the counter saying to

John Magee that 'that's the last you're ever going to see of me!'

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DANIEI. O' NEILL (1920-1974): LANDSCAPE AND FIGURE PAINTER

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9. Dan O'Neill: Belfast after the Riot. 1971. Oil on board, 52 x 68.5 cm. (Collection George and Maura McClelIand). The picture was painted on the Falls Road where the haulier's yard, Woordie & Co Ltd, was bumt out. The picture is one of a pair which the artist painted after the riot.

Although this was his first and last time in Magee's, Nelson Bell

(who now runs the Bell Gallery in Belfast) worked there later

and recalls that they did eventually sell his paintings. In 1944, the poet, John Hewitt, contributed an article to a

book entitled Now in Ulster, compiled by Arthur Campbell and George Campbell, in which he wrote that ...although very differ ent in personality and in their resultant work, it is convenient on sev eral grounds to consider George Campbell, Gerard Dillon, and Dan O'Neill as a group - if painters can fonn a body. In watercolours and

in oils their procedure is similar, as if they wished to seize the ephemeral, the fugitive on the wing. They are strongly emotional. Dan O'Neill, a more individual and assured colourist and picture maker than the others, will on occasion offer an echo of Rouault or Picasso: but he is rapidly forging a mode and manner for his own fre quently morbid attitude to life. I often wish that he and his associates could for once enjoy the finely prepared gesso surface of a panel on which John Luke is about to lay a design.4

It was, however, the Belfast of the Blitz in the 1940's that

motivated many artists of the time to paint. Inspired by the com

plete destruction of his birthplace, O'Neill began to indicate his feelings towards Belfast at the time through his work.

In 1946, an exhibition of his paintings was held at the Victor Waddington Gallery in Dublin and twenty-one out of twenty

three paintings were sold. O'Neill was offered a gallery contract which, by means of regular exhibitions, would guarantee him a steady income. The success of his first one-man show brought him much-needed publicity and critical acclaim both in Dublin and, eventually, in Belfast. He exhibited at the Victor

Waddington Gallery from 1948 to 1955 and his work was shown in London, New York, Beverly Hills, and Amsterdam.

In 1947, hardboard was arriving in Ireland from Sweden. Cheaper than canvas, it was a popular material which was used

by many artists including O'Neill. He worked in thin, transpar ent glazes of oil paint, applied smoothly with soft-hair brushes. He used rich colours and his technique gave him what he sought: luminosity of colour and dark dramatic tones. He imbued everything he painted with a delicate, dreamy mood of serenity tinged with a certain melancholy.

138

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10. Dan O'Neill: The Turms. 1971. Oil on board, 46 x 61 cm. (Collection George and Maura McClelIand). The picture is typical of O'Neill's later style. Pairs of girls and harvest scenes were a recurring theme in his work at this time.

11. Dan ONeill: Cloum. 1972. Oil on board, 68.5 x 52 cm. (Collection George and Maura

McClelland). The picture is one of a pair: its pendant is The Apprentice Cloum. The subject matter was possibly

influenced by Gerard Dillon's paintings of clowns.

12. Dan ONeill: The Sisters (a Dream). 1972. Oil on board, 51 x 76 cm. (Collection George and Maura McClelland). ONeill had a dream that he was in hospital surrounded by nuns and later in the dream he found himself in the hospital gardens with the same nuns. When he woke up he sketched the scene and later painted

this picture.

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DANIEL O' NEILL (1920-1974): LANDSCAPE AND FIGURE PAINTER

In January 1948, at the CEMA Gallery (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) in Belfast, O'Neill showed five paintings in an exhibition by nine painters entitled

Art in Ulster. He also exhibited at Heal's Mansard gallery in London that same year along with Campbell, Dillon, and Neville Johnson. He also showed at the living Art Exhibitions and at the Royal Hibemian Academy. At this time he was living in a small terraced house at Conlig, county Down and the land scape around the village features in a number of his paintings.

Late in 1948, O'Neill made a brief visit to Paris which was a revelation to him and by the time he returned, his work had been transformed. His painting, Place Du Tertre (Fig 2), expresses this change: as the the critic, S B

Kennedy says, 'he has perfectly captured the mood and atmosphere of night life in Bohemian Paris, which is perfectly suited to his familiar nostalgia.'5 One of O'Neill's paintings from this period, which the collector, Zoltan Lewinter Frankyl bought in 1949, was The First Bom (Fig 3), a tender study of mater nity. It is arguably the finest of his works where ... emotion content and formal bal

ance are impressively controlled and where, using a limited palette of deep browns and pale golds, offsetting delicate flesh tints, the artist has cre ated an image of motherhood that must be one of the

nmst telling of Irsh art.' Cecil ifrench Salkeld wrote of this work that 'The First Born is a skillfully balanced composition, employing two contrasting textures of paint: the soft, blurred impasto of the background and flesh: and the heavy, scrambled treatment of the draperies. There is an added effect created here by the use of a

cunningly distorted perspective, of the sort much sought after by cam

eramen. It is in fact a sort of angle-shot. This sends the whole compo

sition into a gentle rocking motion, infinitely soothing and restful, as

the subject demands.7 In 1950, the Cultural Relations Committee set up by the

Ministry of External Affairs in Dublin arranged an exhibition of contemporary Irish painting to be shown across the Atlantic in Rhode Island, Boston, and Ottowa. O'Neill was one of the eleven exhibitors from Ulster. The exhibition was evidence of the growth of interest in Irish art among Irish-Americans at this time.

In March 1952, O'Neill had what was, in effect, a retrospec tive exhibition entitled The Loan Exhibition of Paintings 1944 1952 which was held at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery (now the Ulster Museum) under the auspices of CEMA.

Knockalla Hi11s, Donegal, dated 1951 (Fig 1), was perhaps one of the most memorable works in the exhibition. It was painted during O'Neill's forays to Donegal to paint the area around

Rathmullen. With its dramatic use of black and yellow, it is a

splendid expressionist landscape charged with emotion and full of drama in its juxtaposition of light and shade. S B Kennedy

has commented that it stands in striking contrast to the naturalstic renderings of the Irish landscapes produced by O'Neill's contempo raries and their immediate predecessors, such as Paul Henry, J.H Craig or Frank McKelvey. Yet in its earthiness, it has the quintes

sence of the Irish scene.' In the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, John Hewitt, who was at that time Curator of Art at the Museum, wrote that his awareness of textures has developed amazingly; his work has both a sensory and sensual quality' and 'he

handles with most confidence the great commonplaces of being: birth, death, love, belef, wonder.'

Throughout the early 1950's, ONeill continued to exhibit in the Dublin gallery of Victor Waddington who had also become his agent.

His works were included in many group shows in London, including one of reli gious paintings at the Ashley Gallery (1950); Today and Yesterday - Some Importt Contemporaries, Tooth Gallery (1950); Five Irish Painters, Tooth

Gallery, (1951); and, with Colin Middleton, at the Tooth Gallery in 1954. His work was now not only in pri

vate collections in Ireland and England but also Holland, France, Sweden, the

USA and in the National Gallery in

Australia. His reputation had grown to such an

extent that he merited a six-line entry in

Hutchinson's Encyclopedia of Painting, an American publication of 1956, edited by Benard S Myers, where his style was said to be influenced by the Fauves.

Another memorable work from this period is Birth, dated 1952 (Fig 8). The painting conjures up a com

plex web of emotions and relationships encircling an apparently simple domestic scene. Kenneth

McConkey wrote that the painting is often emonaUy charged. In many ways the picture sets out to link the experience of Irish working and rural class people to the wider spectrum of post-war austerity, in a world now overcast by the possibility of atomic war.10 S B Kennedy described it as one of O'Neill's best works, claiming that Birth is full of drama and emoton rendered with al dte sponaeity of quick brushwork and occasional use of the palette knife which one associ ated with him.1"

In May 1957, O'Neill was engaged to design sets for an Abbey Theatre production of The Playboy of the Westen World. O' Neill went to London a year later because Victor Waddington had set up a gallery there in Cork Street. During the years 1958-68, Waddington was to buy all the paintings which

O'Neill offered to him. He also arranged several exhibitions of O'Neill's work in Montreal at the Waddington Galleries which were run by his brother.

O'Neill retumed to Ireland occasionally and spent some time painting in Kerry and Donegal in the early sixties, and in 1963, an exhibition of his work was held at the Dawson Gallery in

Dublin which was run by Leo Smith. From the time of

13. Dan ONeiI (left) and Gerard Dillon at the opening of their exhibition in the

Contemporary Picture Galleries, Dublin in

1943.

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DANIEL 0' NEILL (1920-1974) - LANDSCAPE AND FIGURE PAINTER

Waddington's departure to England until the early seventies, the Dawson Gallery was the foremost commercial gallery in

Dublin dealing in contemporary art. By the mid-sixties, O'Neill's painting Miends were all retuming to Dublin where they had established considerable reputations. London had been a tough environment for selling their work and, though documentation of those London years is scant, the indication is that O'Neill lost heart and confidence in his new 'big-city' environment and thus became demoralised and decided to return to Belfast. In 1969, he met the Belfast art dealer. George McClelland. who had been collecting his paintings for years. After a lengthy discussion it was agreed that

McClelland would become his dealer and would henceforth buy all of his paintings. McClelland had already spoken to Victor Waddington who gave the arrangement his approval. McClelland supplied him with a place to live and

work where he stayed for almost four years. It was then that he started to

produce the canvasses which were to comprse his Recent Pamtings Exhibtin of 1970, his first one-man show in eigh

teen years and it was held at the

McClelland Galleries. The exhibition was a sell-out and a revelation. O' Neill, who had had a life long struggle with alcohol, was excited by the suc.cess and, in an effort to build on his tri umph, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and eschewed drinking for a year.

Throughout this period, O' Neill began exploring the possibilities of acrylic paint and he experimented

widely with colour. While his subject matter remained the same for the most part, the darkness and detail of the earlier work was replaced by a

clearer composition and line along with a focus on the brilliance and vividness of colour. As Mike Catto wrote, 'demure and elongated figures inhabited a warm, sunny landscape, where once the environment had been viewed harsher and viewed more oppressively."3 T P Flanagan wrote of The Promised Land that the litde group of figures, in those tiess and fashonless gar

ments the painter created for his characters, clusters around a mnasted ship in an estuary under the moonlight, and the whole imeless inter

lude is imbued with the melancholy charm ofa paining by Watteau."

O'Neill drew on his own life's experiences as subjects for his work. Like Markey Robinson, he used the themes of groups waiting on the shore for the return of fishing boats. He focused not on the actual arrival of the boats but on the extended and

lonely wait for them. In May 1971, a one-man show of O'Neill's work was held at the

Dawson Gallery in Dublin. The McCleliand Galleries supplied the paintings and the Dawson Gallery produced the catalogue and

mounted the exhibition. Again. it was an outstanding success and Sheila Walsh, writing in The Irsh Press

of 13 May 1971, remarked at how quickly the red sales tags appeared. A further exhibition was planned for 1972 in Belfast at the McClelland Galleries which unfortu

nately did not take place due to a bomb which wrecked the gallery and general area of May Street in December 1971. This loss of O' Neill's main outlet, cou

pled with the loss of his studio and flat in a fire, probably exacerbated his

drinking which remained relendess untdl his tragic death in March 1974 in the

back of a Belfast taxi.

In a tribute to O'Neill in 1995, Susan Stairs wrote that O'Neill remains today our

most romantic Irish painter and one of our most individual. Like his contemporaris - Campbell, D1ion,

MacCabe, Markey, Luke and Middleton - O'Neill remained a true independent. Althgh part of group as

such, each managed to foUow their own fiercely indepen dent line of tinking. This can be attributed to the most part to their lack of formal tramming. We must be grateful that O'NeiU got to himself before instruction did. For if it

were not so, it is unlikely that Ireland would have pro

duced a painter of such sensual, sensitive, soulful and profound work. He is one of our greatest painters.14

GENA LYNAM holds a diploma in the History of European Painting from Tinky College, Dublin.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author is particularly grateful to George McCleland for his court and kindness in showing O'Neil's work and sharing his recollections of the artist. Gratitude is also due to the following for their valuable help in my research: Patrkia Forster, John Phillips, James McIntyre and Nelson Bell

14. Dan ONeilH with his paindng H orman

Pass By.... The photograph was taken

at the McClelland Galleries Intemational,

Belfast in 1973 just a few months before the death of the painter.

1. M Hunter, Introduction to Catalogue Recent

Paintings by Dan O' Neill, McClelland Galleries

(Belfast 1970). 2. B Fall?n, 'A Very Individual Radiance* in

Daniel O' Neill, an FET Supplement in

Fortnight, vol 307 (June 1992), p. 19. 3. J White, Gerard IMon: An Illustrated Biography

(Dublin 1994), p. 43. 4. J Hewitt, 'Under Forty: Some Ulster Artists*,

from Now in Ulster (Belfast 1944) p. 16 and pp. 33-35.

5. S B Kennedy, Irish Art and Modernism (Belfast

1991), p. 142. 6. T P Flanagan, 'A Gift of Jewellery', in Daniel

O* Neill, an FET Supplement in Fortnigfit, vol

307 (June 1992), p. 5. 7- C ffrench Salkeld, 'Daniel O* Neill: A Critical

Appreciation', in Envoy, vol 1 (Dec 1949), pp. 41-42.

8. SB Kennedy, 'Young Man with a Rose', in

Daniel O' Neill, an FET Supplement in

Fortnight, vol 307 (June 1992), p. 8.

9. J Hewitt, Introduction to Catalogue Daniel

O'Neill, Paintings 1944-1952, BMAG (Belfast

1952). 10. K McConkey, A Free Spirit, Irish Art ?860-1960

(London 1990), p. 80.

11. SB Kennedy (as note 5), p. 142 12.M Catto, Art in Ulster, vol 2 (1957-1977)

(Belfast 1977), p. 60. 13. T P Flanagan (as note 6), p. 6

14. S Stairs, 'A Sense of the Forlorn', in Daniel

O' Neill, an FET Supplement in Fortnigfvt, vol

307 (June 1992) p. 16

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daniel o' neill (1920-1974): landscape and figure painter

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