The elusive Aloysius O'Kelly has finally come home to full honours in his native city. Re-orientations: Painting, Politics and Popular Culture, the current exhibition in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, celebrates a painter admired by Van Gogh and now enjoying renewed popularity. But he combined his highly successful public life with a closely-guarded private life of a revolutionary.
O'Kelly was born in Dublin in 1853 into an extraordinary dynasty of Fenian artists. His uncle, John Lawlor (1820-1901) was a distinguished London sculptor who secured major commissions from the crown, among them the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, even as he hid the crown's enemies in his studio.
All four O'Kelly brothers started their professional lives as sculptors. Aloysius studied at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, one of the very few Irish artists of his time with that distinction. He had established his reputation before he was 30 with work exhibited in the Royal Academy and the Royal Hibernian Academy.
The O'Kelly brothers were also all members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Aloysius was particularly close to the brother best-known to history, James J. O'Kelly - member of the IRB Supreme Council, confidante of Parnell, and finally MP for Roscommon - whose life reads like a picaresque adventure story.
Much of the ordinary detail of the artist's life is unknown, although there is strong evidence of journeys incognito, addresses at "safe houses" and at least one alias. Over a lifespan of some nine decades he lived and worked in Brittany, Ireland, Egypt, north Africa, London, and the US, where he acquired citizenship in 1901. But how and when he travelled, or under what name, or where he lived and with whom, are more often than not a mystery, as is the date and circumstance of his death.
His covert political work may never come to light, but his remarkable work as a subversive artist was widely available, in the heart of the empire at the peak of Fenian activity. Like his uncle before him, Aloysius O'Kelly enjoyed favour with the enemy and in the 1880s was appointed artist to such eminent organs of the empire as the Illustrated London New and the Pictorial World.
In these posts he was called upon to represent such colonial difficulties as the land war agitations in Ireland and the Holy War of the Mahdi in Sudan. As Niamh O'Sullivan, curator of the exhibition comments on the former assignment, his characterisation of the Irish peasantry "is strikingly different from the frequent simianization of the Irish so typical of Victorian illustration" and directly contested the written accounts of an uncontrollable, barbaric race.
The exhibition, which is the gallery's millennium showpiece and will run for two months, includes much of this work, as well as a host of paintings done in Ireland, France, north Africa and the US.
As for Aloysius O'Kelly himself, he was last recorded alive in 1941 as a member the New York Watercolour Club. But whether his subsequent disappearance from their rolls indicates death at the age of 88 or a decision to drop the club and once more slip out of sight, has yet to be discovered.
Re-orientations: Painting, Politics and Popular Culture, in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, runs until January 30th