Print of Seán Keating’s 1924 work The Window.
Mounted with conservation grade boards and tapes and framed in a matt-black scooped frame with a real gold-leaf slip, and real glass glazing.
Last date for Christmas Shipping
Ireland / UK / EU - Dec 9th
USA / World - Nov 27th
Print Image: 385 x 445mm
Frame Overall: 37 x 550 x 605mm
Sean Keating PPRHA, HRA, HRSA, 1889-1977
(Original Oil on canvas, 51" x 46" (120.5 x 116.7cm), signed.)
The Window features Keating's wife, May (nee Walsh) (1895-1965), who was originally from Eadestown in County Kildare. In need of the heat of the sun for her health, May was educated by nuns in Spain. She returned to Dublin, a devout agnostic, in 1916, and met Keating at a local branch of Cuman na nGaedheal. The pair married in the University Church on St Stephen's Green in Dublin in 1919.
They lived for a while in rooms in Woodtown, near Rathfarnham, a bow-ended eighteenth-century house surrounded by large trees that features in Keating's An Allegory (1924), in which May also appears as a mother metaphor cradling the nascent new Ireland.[1] May seated and quietly reading against a non-descript interior was a composition that Keating had perfected in an earlier work titled The Striped Dress (1922), also featuring May, and now in a private collection. The artist initially painted The Window, titling it Sunday Evening, for exhibition in the RHA in 1923, but he changed his mind about showing it. Meanwhile, the revival of the Aonach Tailteann games was the first major sporting and cultural event in Ireland since the Civil War. Held in Croke Park Dublin in August that year, it was hoped that the games and associated arts events would be attractive to tourists from home and abroad and would demonstrate that Ireland and its people were well able to establish a new nation built on the history of old.
One of ten works that Keating exhibited at the event, the large window in the background accentuates May's contemplative pose, a metaphor, perhaps, for the emerging post-civil war nation, and at the same time, alluding to a series of similar work by his mentor, Sir William Orpen.[2]
Dr Eimear O'Connor HRHA, HRUA.
Author Sean Keating: Art, Politics, and Building the Irish Nation
