Impressions of an Irish eye

Walter Osborne died 100 years ago, leaving an imortant legacy of Irish Impressionist art. Julian Campbell reviews the life and work of this acclaimed Irish painter

One hundred years ago this year, an Irish painter returned to his family home at Rathmines for lunch, then hurried away on his bicycle, without an overcoat, in spite of the protestations of the other guests at the dinner table. The weather was unseasonal, he was caught out, perhaps while painting out-of-doors. He contracted pneumonia and, although he had been healthy and full of energy, died a few days later. The artist was Walter Osborne, and he died on April 24th, 1903 aged only 43.

His family was deeply shocked, and his death was regarded as a profound loss to the Dublin art world: Osborne had led a busy career for 25 years, was in his prime, and was widely regarded as the most gifted artist of his generation. Already by the early 1880s, Irish critics were praising the impressive realism of his paintings and, in 1897, the influential English journal The Magazine of Art described Osborne as "the hope of Ireland". By the beginning of the new century, he was forging a radical Impressionist style.

Yet his death, in pursuit of what he loved most of all, painting in the open air, was not an ignoble passing for an artist. I am reminded of the death of the great French painter Paul Cézanne three years later: he was caught in a violent storm while painting in his beloved Provence, and was brought home by a cart driver.

Frederick Walter Osborne was born into a middle-class Dublin family in 1859. His father William was also a painter, specialising in appealing images of pet dogs and cats, much sought after by the professional classes. Walter studied at the RHA schools, and could easily have followed in his father's footsteps as an animal painter. But his departure for Antwerp in 1881 to study in the Royal Academy there proved decisive.

Although Paris was the more popular destination among aspiring art students, many of Osborne's contemporaries - Roderic O'Conor and Dermod O'Brien among them - also started off in Antwerp. Osborne was taught by the Flemish realist Charles Verlat, but he soon revealed an independent streak. Instead of studying clothed models in the life room as his fellow students did, he preferred to paint out in the cobbled streets of old Antwerp and nearby villages. Even at this early stage, his work shows an unusual realism.

Osborne spent much of 1883 in Brittany painting similar rustic scenes in the beautiful villages of Finistère. He was in Pont-Aven three years before a radical circle of artists formed around the powerful personality of Gauguin. But even then, the town was crowded out each summer by an influx of artists of all nationalities. One can imagine the rather conventional Osborne, with his tweed jacket, tie and polished shoes, becoming impatient with the crowds of Americans with their berets, bushy beards and wooden clogs, "hanging out" at the café tables and living out their dream of bohemian life; he moved on to the quieter town of Quimperlé.

Osborne worked hard. His paintings of Breton girls in white coiffes, faded blue aprons and sabots, set in little farmyards, orchards, or at the well, are remarkable for their tangible realism and homely intimacy. His paintings indicate Osborne's unusual ability to represent the fall of sunlight upon rustic textures: cobblestones, bricks, granite blocks and weathered wooden planks. Who was it who claimed that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could be re-built street by street after reading James Joyce's Ulysses? A similar comment could be made about Osborne's paintings. By visiting many of the locations in which he painted, it is possible to identify this little square, or that doorway, and marvel at the exactitude of his representation, stone by stone - although, of course, the figures have long gone.

Osborne does not seem to have been in any hurry to settle back home. For the next few years, he painted much in England, perhaps with a half-conscious wish to establish an independence from his father. In the company of fellow artist, he moved from one town or village, Walberswick, Evesham, Rye, to another, and painted a series of flat agricultural landscapes, with farm labourers and animals present. Although continuing his realistic style, there is often a sentimental vein in Osborne's genre scenes of village children playing with shiny-eyed terriers or fluffy cats. But he never fully embraced the story-telling, "Christmas-card" style of many of his Victorian contemporaries.

Perhaps it was family circumstances, the death of his beloved sister in Canada, that decided Osborne to return to Ireland to help his parents bring up his little niece Violet in their family home. The 1890s were extraordinarily productive years for him: he painted street scenes in Dublin, landscapes at Foxrock and Rush, received commissions for portraits, exhibited every year at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin and at exhibitions in England. He served on committees, made frequent painting trips to Co Galway and travelled on the Continent, notably in Spain and Holland, in the company of Walter Armstrong, later to be director of the National Gallery of Ireland.

His work became eagerly sought after by collectors. In 1900, he was offered a knighthood by the viceroy for his services as a painter, but he declined.

Osborne is much loved for his scenes of Dublin streets, markets and parks - in St Patrick's Close, St Patrick Street, Phoenix Park and so on - they poignantly evoke the Dublin of the last years of the 19th century. It has been remarked that he painted portraits principally as a means of earning a living. But he was a superb portraitist, painting impressive pictures of society ladies and their daughters in their finery. But more intimate are the studies of family and friends, particularly those of his niece Violet and other children playing with dolls, watching animals, or simply idling. These are charming, but they also evoke the ennui of long afternoons, or the fragility of childhood.

As he developed, Osborne moved away from the careful realist style of his earlier work, and his painting was all the time becoming looser, freer, culminating in the full Impressionism of his garden scenes at the turn of the century: depicting children seated on a lawn, women taking tea beneath trees, dappled sunlight falling on their dresses, or people sitting in parks. It is not clear to what extent Osborne was directly influenced by the French Impressionists, but he greatly admired the brilliant canvasses of the American painter John Singer Sargent. In his sensitivity to colour, sunlight and shadow in gardens, his fluid, expressive manner of painting and his depiction of the middle classes at leisure, Osborne was a true Irish Impressionist.

Yet it is surprising to discover that, beneath such vigour and spontaneity, many paintings contain more planning and artifice than may at first appear. The existence of many pencil studies and small oil sketches from nature illustrate how Osborne worked out his ideas. Recent research has also revealed that he was an amateur photographer. So it appears that he worked through a series of drawings, oil sketches and photographs, carefully piecing them together, "orchestrating" them, as it were, until the final "natural", composition fell into place.

Present day art theory dictates that an artist should have an "agenda", that his work should "address issues", or contain a "narrative". Osborne may not have understood such terms. Indeed, under such dogmatic structures, his work would not rate very highly. Many of his paintings do feature working class or country people, or children in ragged clothes, but he is not putting forward a specific social message. But Osborne lived at a time when to "paint from nature", to aspire to representing observable reality as truthfully as possible, were profoundly radical activities.

And what Osborne did have was an unsurpassed visual intelligence.Cézanne's exclamation about the great Impressionist Monet - " . . . only an eye, but what an eye!" - is not exactly apposite for Osborne. But few other Irish artists "lived" so fully through their eyes: observed nature with such tangible accuracy - the side of a building or the rim of a bowl with such crispness, light on a child's face with such tenderness, or the myriad colours in nature with such radiance.

Osborne was devoted to his family and his friends. He loved children, but remained unmarried. He was a loyal friend to many people, including fellow artists in England and Ireland such as Nathaniel Hone, and writers such as Stephen Gwynn. When he was not in his studio, fulfilling a portrait commission, or painting in the open air, he was serving on committees, visiting exhibitions in England or playing cricket, for which he had a passion. If he had not been a painter, he would have been a shrewd businessman, a committee man, a "good sport". Indeed, he was all of these things.

After Osborne's death in 1903, a large memorial exhibition of his work was held at the Royal Hibernian Academy. The show included 270 paintings and drawings, the majority of them loaned from private collections. In 1920, Thomas Bodkin devoted a chapter to him in his classic book Four Irish Landscape Painters.

Jeanne Sheehy began to research Osborne's life and work in the 1960s. Her studies led to several publications, culminating in the superb Osborne retrospective exhibition held at the National Gallery of Ireland in 1983. There are excellent collections of his paintings and drawings there and in the Hugh Lane Gallery. Osborne's work remains as loved and sought after as ever.

To mark Osborne's centenary, there is an exhibition of his paintings from the Hugh Lane Gallery collection, curated by art historian Julian Campbell, at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin until September 14th. Campbell's book, Walter Osborne in Galway and Connemara, will be published this autumn by James Adams.