The week ahead includes a number of important picture sales and they will obviously set the pace in this field for the rest of the season. Among the most important of these events is the auction to be conducted by De Vere's at the RHA Gallagher Gallery on Tuesday evening where, among the 200-odd lots, there are two pictures by Aloysius O'Kelly.
It is interesting to note that both works were included in the exhibition dedicated to this artist which recently ended at Dublin's Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. Clearly, the owners have decided to capitalise on the attention he has just received. The current issue of the Irish Arts Review contains a fascinating article by Julian Campbell showing how, from the beginning of the 20th century, O'Kelly exhibited paintings not just under his own name but also the pseudonym of Arthur Oakley.
The latter was supposedly an American, originally from New York, who had studied at the Academie Julian in Paris. This was certainly true of O'Kelly, except that he was in his fifties at the time. His family was intensely involved in politics, with one brother, James O'Kelly, being a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood's supreme council and a close friend of Parnell. In his twenties, Aloysius O'Kelly went to Paris, where he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; a fellow-student at the time was Irish artist Frank O'Meara.
O'Kelly exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1876 and at the Royal Hibernian Academy a year later. Thereafter, he never seems to have lacked work. In the early 1880s, he provided drawings for The Illustrated London News and, as has been frequently noted, offered a less caricatured vision of Ireland to English readers than they had previously seen.
However, O'Kelly was also well-known for his oriental scenes, views of mosques and North African markets. This diversity of subject matter has only added to the confusion which still surrounds so much of his life. The two paintings being offered on Tuesday were both painted in Europe, with the first of them, lot 59, probably in Ireland since it shows peasants collecting seaweed on the shore. The second lot, number 125, has the self-explanatory title Fisherman beside a Stream and comes from one of the periods O'Kelly - like so many other Irish artists - spent in Brittany. The two pictures both have the same estimate of £20,000£30,000.
Quite why O'Kelly should have chosen to call himself Oakley and adopt an American identity is unclear but may be connected with his political sympathies. On the other hand, he became an American citizen at the start of the 20th century.
Like so much else about him, the precise date of his death is unknown but it would seem to be around 1941 when he would have been close to 90 years of age. The auction in which these pictures feature is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m.
