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Tag Archives: Landscape Painting


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Death of Sculptor Conor Fallon

Irish sculptor Conor Hubert Fallon dies of lung cancer at the Blackrock Clinic, County Dublin, on October 3, 2007.

Fallon is born at Holles Street Hospital, Dublin, on January 30, 1939, the third of six sons of Padraic Fallon, the Irish poet and playwright, and Dorothea Maher. The family moves to Clonard, County Wexford, where he grows up. He has three surviving brothers, Brian, Ivan and Padraic, who have all had journalism careers. His early interest in literature and the arts is nourished by his father and elder brothers, and by contact with the cultured circle of writers, artists, musicians and intellectuals within which his father moves.

Fallon is educated at St. Peter’s College, Wexford, and Trinity College, Dublin. He begins painting in 1957 while at Trinity College, where he is studying natural science but is advised to pay more attention to his art. His interest in painting is probably inspired by the example of Tony O’Malley, a close family friend. As a compromise with his father, who does not see his talent, he also studies accountancy at night.

Largely self-taught in painting, he learns fundamentals of technique from Richard Kingston, to whom he is introduced by O’Malley. He largely paints landscapes in acrylic and gouache, in a manner heavily influenced by that of Jack Butler Yeats.

In 1964, Fallon visits O’Malley in St. Ives, Cornwall, where he had emigrated several years earlier, intending also to meet the Cornish abstract landscape painter Peter Lanyon, the chief creative force in the thriving artists’ colony centred on St. Ives. His arrival, however, coincides with Lanyon’s death from injuries suffered in a gliding accident. A gently sympathetic stranger amid the bereaved artistic community, he finds an immediate empathy and rapport with Nancy Wynne-Jones, a Welsh-born painter sixteen years his senior who had studied under Lanyon. They marry in 1966. They adopt two children in 1970, siblings John and Bridget.

Encouraged to take up sculpture, English sculptor Denis Mitchell becomes Fallon’s mentor in Cornwall, and with Breon O’Casey, he develops his sculpting. He becomes notable for his cast steel and bronze work, especially birds, horses and hares. He has his first solo exhibition in Newlyn in 1972, showing both painting and sculpture.

In May 1972, Fallon moves with his family back to Ireland, settling at Scilly House, on a hillside overlooking the harbour at Kinsale, County Cork. Removed from any centre of artistic activity, he devotes himself fulltime to a solitary development of his sculpture, refining his methodology and technique, and his skills in working various metals, beginning in 1974 to work in steel. In 1975, he first exhibits in Ireland at a solo show at the Emmet Gallery, Dublin, again showing both painting and sculpture, including his first steel sculptures to be exhibited.

Beginning in 1983, Fallon exhibits regularly with the Taylor Galleries, Dublin. Desiring closer proximity to Dublin art activities, and with their children attending university in the city, Fallon and his wife move in 1987 to Ballard House, Ballinaclash, Rathdrum, County Wicklow.

In 1980, Fallon is awarded the Oireachtas gold medal for sculpture. He becomes an honorary associate of the National College of Art and Design in 1993. He is secretary of the Royal Hibernian Academy, becoming a full member in 1989, and on the board of the National Gallery of Ireland. He is also elected to Aosdána in 1984.

In the summer of 2007, some six months after his wife’s death, Fallon wis diagnosed with advanced metastatic lung cancer. He dies on October 3, 2007, at the Blackrock Clinic, County Dublin, and is buried beside his wife in Ballinatone churchyard, Greenan, Rathdrum, County Wicklow.


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Death of Nelly O’Brien, Miniaturist, Artist & Activist

Ellen Lucy or Nelly O’Brien, Irish miniaturist, landscape artist, and Gaelic League activist, dies suddenly on April 1, 1925, while visiting her brother Dermod at 66 Elm Park Gardens, London.

O’Brien is born Ellen Lucy O’Brien on June 4, 1864, at Cahirmoyle, County Limerick. She is the eldest child of Edward William O’Brien and Mary O’Brien (née Spring Rice). Her siblings are Lucy and Dermod, with Dermod also becoming an artist. Her father is a landowner, and her mother is a sculptor and painter and sister of Thomas Spring Rice. Her grandfather is William Smith O’Brien.

While a young child, O’Brien spends two years living on the French Riviera from 1866 to 1868. Her mother later dies of tuberculosis, and the three children are raised by their aunt, the writer and nationalist, Charlotte Grace O’Brien. Their father remarries in 1880, to Julia Marshall, with whom he has two sons and two daughters.

O’Brien attends school in England from 1879, and later enrolls to study painting at the Slade School of Fine Art. She meets Walter Osborne through her brother Dermod, and considers herself engaged to him, but Osborne dies on April 24, 1903. A portrait of O’Brien by Osborne is held in the Hugh Lane Gallery.

O’Brien returns to Ireland and begins to paint miniatures on ivory using a magnifying glass. She also paints watercolour landscapes. Her first exhibition with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) is in 1896, where she shows three works including Sketch near Malahide. She exhibits with the RHA on and off until 1922. During some of her time in Dublin, she lives with her half-brother, Edward Conor Marshall O’Brien, on Mount Street.

As part of an exhibition of Irish painters, O’Brien exhibits a number of portrait miniatures at the London Guildhall in 1904. The 1906 Oireachtas na Gaeilge features a number of her paintings, and in the same year she becomes honorary secretary of a newly established art committee. At the Munster–Connacht exhibition in Limerick of 1906, she exhibits a miniature of William Smith O’Brien amongst her 12 works on show. She produces many portraits, including one of Douglas Hyde, which is exhibited by the RHA in 1916.

O’Brien is an early member of the Gaelic League, being present at its first Oireachtas na Gaeilge in 1897 and founding the Craobh na gCúig gCúigí (Branch of the Five Provinces). In 1905, she writes a long letter in defence of Douglas Hyde and the Gaelic League in The Church of Ireland Gazette. She holds meetings of Craobh na gCúig gCúigí in her flat at 7 St. Stephen’s Green every Saturday night in 1907. In 1911, she founds Coláiste Eoghain Uí Chomhraí (O’Curry Irish College) in Carrigaholt, County Clare, which is named in honour of Eugene O’Curry, with the help of her cousin and friend Mary Spring Rice.

One of her ultimate goals is to create a national Irish church, which would unite Protestants and Catholics through the Irish language. To this end, she establishes the Irish Guild of the Church with Seoirse de Rút in 1914. The aim of the organisation is to provide a communal union for members of the Church of Ireland who are dedicated to “Irish Ireland” ideals.

Acting as a representative for the Gaelic League, she travels to the United States with Fionan MacColuim in 1914 to 1915, to fund raise and promote Irish art and industries. At Coláiste Eoghain Uí Chomhraí, she stresses the importance of the Irish language in the home, as well as the skills of housewives and those in domestic service in strengthening the language and Irish culture.

O’Brien notes that she initially thought that the 1916 Easter Rising was “in the nature a demonstration against conscription as it had been announced that the volunteers would resist disarmament.” She is staying with the Hydes at 1 Earlsfort Place during the Rising, as her flat at College Park Chambers had been destroyed. She protests the conscription bill in Ireland as a mass meeting of women at the Mansion House in 1918. She launches the Gaelic Churchman in 1919 as the official publication of the Irish Guild of the Church. In one article entitled A plea for the Irish services, she promotes her campaign for Irish language services in Protestant churches. In her capacity of vice-president of the guild, she invites Éamon de Valera to attend one of their meetings in 1921.

O’Brien dies suddenly on April 1, 1925, while visiting Dermod at 66 Elm Park Gardens, London. She is buried at the family plot in Cahirmoyle.

(Pictured: Nelly O’Brien by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1723-1792)


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Birth of Rosaleen Brigid Ganly, Painter & Sculptor

Brigid Ganly HRHA, Irish painter and sculptor, is born Rosaleen Brigid O’Brien on January 29, 1909, in Dublin.

Ganly is one of five children born to Dermod O’Brien, a painter, and his wife Mabel Smiley. Her great-grandfather is the Irish Republican William Smith O’Brien. She grows up on a farm in Cahirmoyle, County Limerick, until the family moves to Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin. She goes on to attend the Metropolitan School of Art where she has the opportunity to study under Patrick Tuohy, Seán Keating and Oliver Sheppard. She is a talented sculptor and wins several awards, including the Taylor scholarship in 1929, for her allegorical male nude, Pity. She spends time in Paris in 1951 where she trains with André Lhote. She travels to Greece where Lhote continues to influence her work.

Ganly also studies painting in the Royal Hibernian Academy School where she has Margaret Clarke and Seán O’Sullivan as teachers. She is made an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1928 and becomes a member in 1935 though, in 1969, resigns her membership in protest of the lack of young artists being given the opportunity to exhibit. In 1972 she is made an honorary member and returns.

Ganly is a representational artist and while known as a portrait artist, she also paints landscapes, interiors and may be best known for her still lifes. Some of her best works are portraits of her husband, her sister Ethel, her father, and her friend Sheila Pim. She illustrates the book-jackets of Sheila Pim’s works. She has many exhibitions, with the RHA and the Water Colour Society of Ireland. There is a retrospective of her life in 1998 at the Hugh Lane Gallery and her works are in the collections there. She is also in the collections of the Waterford Municipal Gallery, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and in The National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland. She is part of the 2014 exhibition ‘Irish Women Artists: 1870-1970.’

Ganly’s sister-in-law is Kitty Wilmer O’Brien with whom she often exhibits. She marries Andrew Ganly, a dental surgeon and writer with a strong involvement in theatre, in 1936. He dies in 1982. They have two children, Eoghan and Phillida.

Brigid Ganly dies on March 25,2002.

(Pictured: “Storm Over Poros” (1964) by Rosaleen Brigid Ganly, HRHA)


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Birth of Arthur Armstrong, Landscape & Still Life Painter

Arthur Armstrong, landscape and still life painter who often works in a Cubist style, is born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, on January 12, 1924. A prolific painter, completing up to 300 paintings a year, in oils, watercolour and mixed media, he regards himself first and foremost as an abstract artist.

Armstrong is the son of a house painter and attends Strandtown Primary School. Later he studies architecture at Queen’s University Belfast, but after two years he moves to study art at Belfast School of Art. The influence of Cubism and the School of Paris can be clearly seen in his work, which takes him to England, France and Spain. He also travels and paints in the west of Ireland and Connemara inspires some of his best work. In 1950 his work is exhibited in the Grafton Gallery in Dublin, and subsequent exhibitions take place in England, Spain and the United States, as well as in Belfast and Dublin. In 1957 he is awarded a travelling scholarship from the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), a forerunner of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and goes to Spain. He eventually settles in Dublin in 1962 and begins showing work at the Royal Hibernian Academy.

In 1968 Armstrong is awarded the Douglas Hyde Gold Medal at the Oireachtas Exhibition. In 1969 he designs sets, with George Campbell and Gerard Dillon, for the Seán O’Casey play, Juno and the Paycock, at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He becomes a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1972 and in 1973 he is awarded the Art in Context prize from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He becomes a member of Aosdána in 1981, the same year that a retrospective exhibition of his work from 1950 to 1980 is held by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

From 1971 Armstrong lives at 28 Chelmsford Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin, in a house he shares with Gerard Dillon. A bachelor, Armstrong dies in a Dublin hospital on January 13, 1996. The contents of his studio are sold February 3, 1998.

(Pictured: “Glendalough” by Arthur Armstrong, oil on board)


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Death of Painter William Dermod O’Brien

William Dermod O’Brien, Irish painter commonly known as Dermod O’Brien, dies in Dublin on October 3, 1945. Most of his paintings are landscapes and portraits. His work is part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

O’Brien is born on June 10, 1865, at Mount Trenchard House near Foynes in County Limerick, the son of Edward William O’Brien and Hon. Mary Spring Rice, granddaughter of Thomas Spring Rice, 1st Baron Monteagle of Brandon. For a time after his mother’s death, he is raised by his aunt Charlotte Grace O’Brien, along with his sisters, Nelly and Lucy. His father subsequently remarries in 1880. He is educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge.

O’Brien marries Mabel Emmeline Smyly, daughter of Sir Philip Crampton Smyly, on March 8, 1902. Together they have five children. His son Brendan, a surgeon in Dublin, marries artist Kitty Wilmer O’Brien. His daughter Rosaleen Brigid becomes an artist, also known as Brigid Ganly after her marriage to Andrew Ganly. Another artistic relative is Geraldine O’Brien.

Unlike many of his Irish contemporaries, after graduating from Cambridge O’Brien does not study art in Dublin, opting instead to travel to Paris, where he studies the paintings at the Louvre. In 1887, he visits galleries in Italy and then enrolls at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. At the Academy he is a fellow student of Walter Osborne. He leaves Antwerp in 1891 and returns to Paris, where he studies at Académie Julian. He relocates to London in 1893 and then Dublin in 1901.

O’Brien is designated an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1906, a member in 1907, and is later president between 1910 and 1945. He is made an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1912.

O’Brien holds the office of High Sheriff of County Limerick in 1916 and serves as Deputy Lieutenant of County Limerick. He serves in the Artists Rifles during World War I.

(Pictured: Dermod O’Brien by Howard Coster, print, late 1930s, given to the National Portrait Gallery, London by the estate of Howard Coster, 1978)


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Death of Landscape Artist Dairine Vanston

Dairine (Doreen) Vanston, Irish landscape artist who works in a Cubist style, dies in Enniskerry, County Wicklow on July 12, 1988.

Vanston is born in Dublin on October 19, 1903. She is the daughter of solicitor John S. B. Vanston, and sculptor Lilla Vanston (née Coffey). She attends Alexandra College, going on to study at Goldsmith’s College, London under Roger Bissière. She then goes to Paris to the Académie Ranson, being sent there following the advice of Paul Henry. While in Paris she meets Guillermo Padilla, a Costa Rican law student at the University of Paris. They marry in 1926 and she takes the name Vanston de Padilla. The couple lives for a time in Italy, before moving to San José, Costa Rica. The marriage breaks down in the early 1930s, at which point she returns to Paris with her son and studies with André Lhote. She is living in France at the outbreak of World War II with Jankel Adler, but is able to escape to London in 1940, and later to Dublin.

Vanston’s time in Paris leaves a lasting impression on her work, including use of primary colours and a strong Cubist influence. She belongs to what critic Brian Fallon calls the “Franco-Irish generation of painters who looked to Paris,” along with Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, and Norah McGuinness. Her time spent living in Costa Rica in the late 1920s and early 1930s imbues her work with tropical and highly toned colours. In Dublin in 1935, she exhibits 17 paintings, largely Costa Rican landscapes, at Daniel Egan’s gallery on St. Stephen’s Green. This is the closest thing to a solo show she would mount, with this show also featuring Grace Henry, Cecil Ffrench Salkeld, and Edward Gribbon.

Meeting the English artist Basil Rakoczi, who is also living in Dublin during World War II, leads Vanston to become associated with The White Stag group. In November 1941, she exhibits for the first time at a group show with 24 other artists, including Patrick Scott. One work that is shown at this exhibition is the painting Keel dance hall, which demonstrates that she spends time in the west of Ireland. The most important event staged by the group is the Exhibition of subjective art, which takes place at 6 Lower Baggot St. in January 1944. The Dublin Magazine notes her work at this show as the most effective of the experimental vanguard. This work, Dying animal, is a Cubist work with semi-representation forms rendered in bold colours. In 1945, her work is featured in a White Stag exhibition in London of young Irish painters at the Arcade gallery, Old Bond St.

In 1947, Vanston spends almost a year in Costa Rica where she paints primarily in watercolours. Apart from this period, she lives and works in Dublin, living at 3 Mount Street Crescent near St. Stephen’s Church. At the inaugural Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943, she exhibits five works. At the first Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1960, of which she is a founder, she exhibits three landscapes and a work entitled War. She largely exhibits with the Independent Artists, the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, and the Oireachtas na Gaeilge, and does not exhibit with the Royal Hibernian Academy. Later in life, she exhibits with the Figurative Image exhibitions in Dublin, and is amongst the first painters chosen for Aosdána. A number of her works are featured in the 1987 exhibition, Irish women artists, from the eighteenth century to the present arranged by the National Gallery of Ireland and The Douglas Hyde Gallery.

Vanston dies on July 12, 1988, in a nursing home in Enniskerry, County Wicklow. Her work is greatly admired, but has received little by way of critical attention, which may have been to do with her slow rate of output. A number of her works have proved difficult to trace. She was a private person, even refusing to cooperate with the Taylor Galleries in the 1980s when they wanted to mount a retrospective of her work. The National Self-Portrait Collection in Limerick holds a work by Vanston.

(Pictured: “Landscape with Lake and Hills” (1964), oil on paper (monotype) by Dairine Vanston)


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Birth of Jack Butler Yeats, Artist & Olympic Medalist

John “Jack” Butler Yeats, Irish artist and Olympic medalist, is born in London, England on August 29, 1871.

Yeats’s early style is that of an illustrator. He only begins to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland, especially of his boyhood home of Sligo, County Sligo. His work contains elements of Romanticism.

Yeats is the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats and the brother of William Butler Yeats, the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient. He grows up in Sligo with his maternal grandparents, before returning to his parents’ home in London in 1887. Early in his career he works as an illustrator for magazines like The Boy’s Own Paper and Judy, draws comic strips, including the Sherlock Holmes parody “Chubb-Lock Homes” for Comic Cuts, and writes articles for Punch under the pseudonym “W. Bird.” In 1894 he marries Mary Cottenham, also a native of England and two years his senior and resides in Wicklow according to the 1911 Census of Ireland.

From around 1920, Yeats develops into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism. He is sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active. However, he believes that “a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints,” and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helps articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man. Samuel Beckett writes that “Yeats is with the great of our time… because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence.” The Marxist art critic and author John Berger also pays tribute to Yeats from a very different perspective, praising the artist as a “great painter” with a “sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know.”

Yeats’s favourite subjects included the Irish landscape, horses, circus and travelling players. His early paintings and drawings are distinguished by an energetic simplicity of line and colour, his later paintings by an extremely vigorous and experimental treatment of often thickly applied paint. He frequently abandons the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and is deeply interested in the expressive power of colour. Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century (and the first to sell for over £1m), he takes no pupils and allows no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure. The artist closest to him in style is his friend, the Austrian painter, Oskar Kokoschka.

Besides painting, Yeats has a significant interest in theatre and in literature. He is a close friend of Samuel Beckett. He designs sets for the Abbey Theatre, and three of his own plays are also produced there. He writes novels in a stream of consciousness style that James Joyce acknowledges, and also many essays. His literary works include The Careless Flower, The Amaranthers, Ah Well, A Romance in Perpetuity, And to You Also, and The Charmed Life. Yeats’s paintings usually bear poetic and evocative titles. Indeed, his father recognizes that Jack is a far better painter than he, and also believes that “someday I will be remembered as the father of a great poet, and the poet is Jack.” He is elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916. He dies in Dublin on March 28, 1957, and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.

Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland’s first medalist at the Olympic Games in the wake of creation of the Irish Free State. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, his painting The Liffey Swim wins a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games. In the competition records the painting is simply entitled Swimming.

(Pictured: Photo of Jack Butler Yeats by Alice Boughton)


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Death of Artist Jack Butler Yeats

jack-butler-yeats

John “Jack” Butler Yeats, artist, Olympic medalist and brother of William Butler Yeats, dies in Dublin on March 28, 1957.

Butler’s early style is that of an illustrator. He only begins to work regularly in oils in 1906. His early pictures are simple lyrical depictions of landscapes and figures, predominantly from the west of Ireland, especially of his boyhood home of Sligo. His work contains elements of Romanticism.

Yeats is born in London on August 29, 1871. He is the youngest son of Irish portraitist John Butler Yeats. He grows up in Sligo with his maternal grandparents, before returning to his parents’ home in London in 1887. Early in his career he works as an illustrator for magazines like The Boy’s Own Paper and Judy, draws comic strips, including the Sherlock Holmes parody “Chubb-Lock Homes” for Comic Cuts, and writes articles for Punch under the pseudonym “W. Bird.” In 1894 he marries Mary Cottenham, also a native of England and two years his senior and resides in Wicklow according to the Census of Ireland, 1911.

From around 1920, Yeats develops into an intensely Expressionist artist, moving from illustration to Symbolism. He is sympathetic to the Irish Republican cause, but not politically active. However, he believes that “a painter must be part of the land and of the life he paints,” and his own artistic development, as a Modernist and Expressionist, helps articulate a modern Dublin of the 20th century, partly by depicting specifically Irish subjects, but also by doing so in the light of universal themes such as the loneliness of the individual, and the universality of the plight of man. Samuel Beckett writes that “Yeats is with the great of our time… because he brings light, as only the great dare to bring light, to the issueless predicament of existence.” The Marxist art critic and author John Berger also pays tribute to Yeats from a very different perspective, praising the artist as a “great painter” with a “sense of the future, an awareness of the possibility of a world other than the one we know.”

Yeats’s favourite subjects include the Irish landscape, horses, circus and travelling players. His early paintings and drawings are distinguished by an energetic simplicity of line and colour, his later paintings by an extremely vigorous and experimental treatment of often thickly applied paint. He frequently abandons the brush altogether, applying paint in a variety of different ways, and is deeply interested in the expressive power of colour. Despite his position as the most important Irish artist of the 20th century, he takes no pupils and allows no one to watch him work, so he remains a unique figure. The artist closest to him in style is his friend, the Austrian painter, Oskar Kokoschka.

Besides painting, Yeats has a significant interest in theatre and in literature. He is a close friend of Samuel Beckett. He designs sets for the Abbey Theatre, and three of his own plays are also produced there. He writes novels in a stream of consciousness style that James Joyce acknowledges, and also many essays. His literary works include The Careless Flower, The Amaranthers, Ah Well, A Romance in Perpetuity, And To You Also, and The Charmed Life. His paintings usually bear poetic and evocative titles. He is elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1916.

Yeats holds the distinction of being Ireland’s first medalist at the Olympic Games in the wake of creation of the Irish Free State. At the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, his painting The Liffey Swim wins a silver medal in the arts and culture segment of the Games. In the competition records the painting is simply entitled Swimming.

Yeats dies in Dublin on March 28, 1957, and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.


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Death of Landscape Painter T.P. Flanagan

t-p-flanagan

Terence Philip “T.P.” Flanagan, one of the finest landscape painters of his generation, passes away in Belfast on February 23, 2011, at the age of eighty. For more than 60 years he shapes the face of landscape painting in Northern Ireland and is known internationally for his rural scenes of his native County Fermanagh and County Sligo. With his stunning watercolours and intricate brush strokes, he is described as one of the most successful artists of his generation. Poet Seamus Heaney, who dedicates his 1969 poem Bogland to Flanagan, pays tribute saying “he was a teacher and a friend whose work held a deep personal significance.”

Flanagan is born in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh in 1929. When he is in his late teens, he learns the art of watercolour painting from the famous local portraitist and landscape artist Kathleen Bridle. Later, he paints her portrait, which now hangs in the Ulster Museum, and interviews her in a film of her life and art, which is produced shortly before her death in 1989.

After his time with Bridle, Flanagan attends Belfast College of Art from 1949-1953. The following year he joins the teaching staff at St. Mary’s College of Education, where he remains for 28 years, eventually becoming Head of the Art Department.

Flanagan spends the majority of his painting career in Ireland, but his landscapes have received wide attention and his work has been recognised both in Ireland and abroad. His first solo exhibition is held at the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), Belfast in 1961. He also shows regularly at the Hendriks Gallery in Dublin and at the Tom Caldwell Gallery in Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s. He participates in many group exhibitions, including “Four Ulster Painters” at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol (1965), “Two Irish Painters” (with Colin Middleton) at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, (1968) and is represented in “The Gordon Lambert Collection Exhibitions” held at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin (1972) and the Ulster Museum (1976). In addition, he exhibits at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in Dublin and at the Royal Ulster Academy Of Arts (RUA) in Belfast.

Abroad, Flanagan’s works are exhibited at the Armstrong Gallery, New York (1986) and the Concept Gallery, Pittsburgh. A retrospective of his painting from the period 1967-1977 is held at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 1977. In 1995, the Ulster Museum stages a major retrospective of his paintings (1945-1995). Other retrospectives are held at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin and the Stadsmusueum, Gothenberg, Sweden. His paintings are also included in the show “A Century of Irish Painting” organized by the Hugh Lane Gallery which tours Japanese museums in 1995.

As an artist, Flanagan works in oils as well as his preferred watercolours, although by rapid application of the paint with minimal overworking, even his oils manage to retain the luminous colouring of the watercolourist. He specializes in landscape painting within his native County Fermanagh and the adjoining County Sligo, his methods being ideally suited to capturing the soft atmospheric light of Ireland’s northwest.

Flanagan is elected associate of the RUA in 1960, a full member in 1964, and President 1978-82. During his long career, he receives numerous commissions and other awards for his works, which are represented in the collections of The Arts Councils of Ireland & Northern Ireland, the Ulster Museum, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the National Self-Portrait Collection, Limerick.

Flanagan dies suddenly on February 23, 2011. His funeral takes place at St. Brigid’s Church in south Belfast and is buried at St. Michaels’ Church in Enniskillen.

The auction record for a work by T.P. Flanagan is set in 2009, when his landscape painting, entitled Castlecoole From Lough Coole, is sold at Christie’s, London, for £20,000.

(From Encyclopedia of Visual Artists In Ireland, visual-arts-cork.com)


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Birth of Irish Artist Nano Reid

nano-reid-crumphan-achill

Nano Reid, Irish landscape artist, figure painter and portraitist, is born in Drogheda, County Louth on March 1, 1900. An individual, expressionistic artist, Reid is acknowledged to be one of the finest Irish woman painters of twentieth-century visual art in Ireland. Her works are represented in many public collections throughout Ireland.

In 1920, Reid wins a scholarship to study fine art painting and drawing at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, now the National College of Art and Design, under Harry Clarke. At the time, she is, in the words of fellow student Hilda van Stockum, “a fierce redhead…uncompromising and looking for truth.” In 1925 she starts showing at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), submitting a total of 42 canvases until the late 1960s.

In 1928, Reid goes to Paris and enrolls briefly at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, after which she spends a year in London studying fine art at the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Bernard Meninsky. She returns to Ireland in 1931 and once more begins exhibiting her landscape painting at the RHA.

In 1950, with Norah McGuinness, Reid represents Ireland at the Venice Biennale. This is followed by the Exhibition of Contemporary Irish Art in Aberystwyth, Wales (1953), and the Mostra Internazionale di Bianco e Nero in Lugano, Switzerland (1956), the Guggenheim International Award Exhibition in New York City (1960) and the Twelve Irish Painters show in New York City (1963). In 1974, the Arts Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland stage a major retrospective of Reid’s artworks.

Nano Reid dies in Drogheda in 1981. Retrospectives are held at Taylor Galleries in Dublin (1984), Droichead Arts Centre in Drogheda (1991), and at Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, County Mayo (1999).

(Pictured: “Crumphan, Achill,” oil on canvas)