Frank O'Meara

Frank O'Meara (1853-1888) Rverie (Dreaming) signed and dated 'O'MEARA/1882' (lower left) oil on canvas 71 x 51 in. (180 x 129.5 cm.) Provenance Private Collection, France. Literature Illustrated London News, 20 May 1882, p.494. Magazine of Art, 5, 1882, p.xli. J. Campbell, The Irish Impressionists, exhibition at The NationalGallery of Ireland, Dublin, and The Ulster Museum, Belfast,1984-85, catalogue p.45. K. McConkey, The Irish Renascence, London, 1986, p.18. J. Campbell, Frank O'Meara and his Contemporaries, exhibition atThe Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin; The CrawfordGallery, Cork; and The Ulster Museum, Belfast, 1989, cataloguepp.xii, 24-25, 41: Appendix 1, p.72, no.9 as 'present whereaboutsunknown'. Exhibited Paris, Salon, 1882, no.2025. London, Fine Art Society, A Collection of British and AmericanArtists from the Paris Salon, 1883, no.14. Lot Notes The recent rediscovery of this picture restores an importantwork to the small oeuvre of Frank O'Meara, who died at the age ofthirty-five and was a painfully slow worker, apparently producingno more than one major painting a year. Born at Carlow in 1853,O'Meara came from a cosmopolitan family that had long distinguisheditself in medicine. Generations of O'Mearas had been doctors, andFrank's grandfather, Dr. Barry O'Meara, had attended Napoleon on StHelena. There was also a strong literary strain in the family,surfacing particularly in Frank's cousin, Kathleen, who publishednovels and biographies under the name of Grace Ramsay. O'Meara received his formal education in Carlow and Dublin. At thisstage he too may have had a medical career in mind, but in theearly 1870s he decided to study art in Paris. The city was rapidlyemerging from the horrors of the Commune, and O'Meara was one of anumber of young Irish artists whom it attracted at this date. Heentered the studio of Carolus-Duran, a friend of Manet's who wasestablishing a successful portrait practice and had opened anatelier in the boulevard Montparnasse as recently as 1872. Many ofthe students were British or American, and O'Meara's companionsincluded the brilliant young John Singer Sargent, another American,Will H. Low, whose reminiscences, A Chronicle of Friendships(1908), contains much valuable information about the youngIrishman, and the colourful Scot, R.A.M. Stevenson, who was laterto distinguish himself as an art-critic. Stevenson's cousin RobertLouis was also a leading light in the expatriate community. Unlike most of the these figures, O'Meara remained in France longafter his student days were over, making only brief trips home toIreland. He was soon moving out of Paris in search of the plein-airsubjects that were claiming the attention of artists across Europeat this date. In 1875 he visited Barbizon, where several of thecircle, including Low and the Stevensons, had settled, and wheresome of the older generation of French artists who had been soclosely associated with the village were still living. But inAugust that year the set moved on to Grez-sur-Loing, situated onthe other side of the forest of Fontainebleau. The village not onlyhad a river ideal for swimming and boating, but a medieval church,a ruined castle, a mill, and a cheep-and-cheerful inn, the PensionChevillon. In fact it seemed to possess everything that appealed tothe artistic temperament, being intensely picturesque but sopeaceful that it invited indolence. Robert Louis Stevensondescribed it as 'a pretty and very melancholy village ... A lowbridge of many arches choked with sedge; great fields of white andyellow water-lilies; poplars and willows innumerable; and about itall such an atmosphere of sadness and slackness, one could donothing but get into the boat and out of it again, and yawn forbedtime'. Corot had painted at Grez as early as 1863, but it was only in theearly 1870s that an artistic colony was established. Many of thepainters were British or American, and all were young, some of themstill students. Sargent arrived not long after O'Meara, finding theplace 'a veritable nest of bohemians'. Another early recruit wasthe Anglo-Austrian artist Louis Welden Hawkins, who knew Whistlerand had shared rooms with O'Meara's fellow Irishman George Moore inParis. By 1877 some of the original group were leaving, but theywere followed by many others. Indeed the 1880s were the heyday ofthe Grez community. Robert Louis Stevenson, discussing Grez in anarticle on 'Village Communities of Painters' which he contributedto the Magazine of Art in 1884, observed that he had seen thebridge over the river Loing, one of the most popular localsubjects, 'beaming from the walls of a hundred exhibitions', theSalon, Royal Academy, the recent Exposition Universelle in Paris.Among the artists most deeply involved in this defining movement inthe development of international impressionism were William Stottof Oldham, the Scots James Guthrie and Arthur Melville, theIrishmen John Lavery and Roderic O'Conor, the American AlexanderHarrison, and the Swede Carl Larsson, who, like Will Low, wasO'Meara's exact contemporary. Larsson's compatriot AugustStrindberg was another visitor. Men of letters and even musicianswere always an essential part of the Grez community. While other talents came and went, O'Meara lived on in the village,making it his base for thirteen years. Chevillon's was his home,and he found constant inspiration in the river and the neighbouringforest. 'A figure who perhaps more than anyone else ... embodiedthe spirit of Grez', wrote the Swedish artist Georg Pauli, 'was theIrishman ... O'Meara. Nobody knew how long he had been in Grez, andno-one ever saw him leaving'. He was the first person 'that metyour eye, when the carriage turned into the poor little villagestreet ... He was standing leaning against the door of Chevillon'sInn, which was opposite the approaching road. He was dressed in apair of knickerbockers, and made more of an impression of a poetthan an artist'. O'Meara appears in a famous photograph of the Grezcircle published in Will Low's book, and he is almost certainly theartist in beret and knee-breeches who lounges against the bridge inLavery's On the Bridge at Grez (private collection; 1989exhibition, no.18). In character, according to Low, he was the'pure type of the Celt ... To the capricious moodiness of his race,the alternative sunshine and rain of his emerald isle, O'Mearajoined an exquisitely sensitive temperament as an artist ...Superficially he realised well one of the heroes of Charles Lever'snovels, gay, witty and insouciant, with a capacity for sudden whiteanger, when it behoved his best friends to treat him with a cautionuntil a change of mood brought back the sunshine'. Sargent foundhim 'irresistible', and captured his Irish good looks, his charmand vulnerability in a portrait painted in 1875 (CenturyAssociation, New York; 1989 exhibition, no.12). Despite his reputation for indolence ('no-one had ever seen himwith a palette in his hands' wrote Pauli), O'Meara worked hard atGrez and was by no means without ambition, exhibiting at the ParisSalon, the Grosvenor Gallery in London, the Royal HibernianAcademy, the Glasgow Institute, and the Liverpool AutumnExhibitions. He was also represented at the Glasgow InternationalExhibition of 1888, the year he died at Carlow from malaria,contracted, it is said, from painting in a French marsh some fouryears earlier. Nor did he ever lack critical acclaim, while Lavery,R.A.M. Stevenson and others who had known him continued to keep hismemory green after his tragically early death. Hugh Lane acquiredfive of his most important pictures for the Municipal Gallery ofModern Art which opened in Dublin in 1908, and although hesubsequently became something of a forgotten figure, a modernreassessment of O'Meara and his contemporaries was provided by theexhibition which circulated in Ireland in 1989. O'Meara not only embodied 'the spirit of Grez' but thecharacteristic 'Grez style' in painting, restricted in tone, withan emphasis on greys, browns, and greens, and restrained, evensombre, in mood. Like so many of these artists, he was influencedboth by the realism of Bastien-Lepage and the symbolism of Puvis deChavannes, seeking a synthesis of the two like that achieved byanother French artist they admired, J.-C. Cazin. In common withother products of Carolus-Duran's atelier, including Sargent, healso had a profound respect for Velazquez. There are many parallelsbetween O'Meara's work and that of such fellow Grez artists asStott, Lavery and Larsson, and their debt to him is wellrecognised. Indeed either through them or directly his influencewas wide on both Glasgow and Scandinavian artists. 'He may be saidto have founded a school', wrote a Scottish art critic in1915. But while O'Meara's work is characteristic of his circle, itpossesses a dimension of poetry and symbolism that was matched byfew of his contemporaries. It constantly harps on themes of loss,melancholy reflection and bitter regret. The titles of his picturesspeak for themselves: Autumnal Sorrows, The Old Old Story, TheWidow, Twilight, October, November, Towards Night and Winter, OldWoman burning Leaves, and so on. The 'sad' and 'melancholy'atmosphere of Grez itself was no doubt partly responsible.Certainly depression seemed to grow on him during his later yearsin the village, as departing comrades left him isolated and hesuffered from poor health and shortage of money. But O'Mearaclearly responded to his surroundings more intensely than most.Perhaps, as has been suggested, he was profoundly affected by thefact that his mother, a brother and a sister all died during hismost impressionable years. Or perhaps Irish romanticism was theroot cause of the mood he so often evokes, an almost Pre-Raphaeliteintensity of feeling and everything summed up in the phrase 'Celtictwilight', associated above all with the early poetry of W.B.Yeats. 'Memories of dim woods peopled by damsels, half-fairy,half-human, rise up as I think of his work', wrote Will Low. 'Oncereleased from the thraldom of school work, his fancy ran riot, andmuch which we today, in the work of W.B. Yeats and others,recognise as a definite attempt to express the nationalcharacteristics of his race in poetry and painting was foreshadowedin the tentative efforts of Frank O'Meara'. The present picture is a perfect example of O'Meara's style. It wasshown at the Paris Salon of 1882, an exhibition at which severalother Grez artists, including Sargent, Stott, Hawkins and AlexanderHarrison, were represented, and which also contained major works bytheir heroes, Puvis and Bastien-Lepage, as well as Manet's Bar auxFolies-Bergre (Courtauld Institute Galleries, London). A review inthe Illustrated London News discussed the artists working in theFrench realist tradition, and was inclined to criticise O'Meara fornot being a closer adherent. 'He has ignored the canons of theschool and attempted the ideal instead of evolving it in a naturalway from the simply real'. The picture was the second work calledRverie that O'Meara had shown at the Salon, the first havingappeared in 1879; and it is interesting that a picture by Lowexhibited there in 1876, one of the first works by a pupil ofCarolus-Duran to achieve success, had had the same title. O'Meara's first Rverie may be the picture now called AutumnalSorrows, his earliest extant painting, which was acquired in 1980by the Ulster Museum, Belfast (1989 exhibition, no.2). If so, thislong Corot-like composition, with the bridge at Grez stretchingacross the middle distance, is very different in conception to thepresent work. In fact the Rverie of 1882 belongs to a sequence ofpictures painted in the 1880s in which solitary female figures areshown absorbed in thought on the banks of the river Loing. It ismore or less contemporary with The Widow (Hugh Lane MunicipalGallery of Modern Art, Dublin; 1989 exhibition, no.4), and at onetime it was even thought that they might be the same picture. Butthe closest comparison is Twilight (private collection; 1989exhibition, no.5), a picture painted a year later and exhibited atthe Glasgow Institute in 1884. In imagery, composition, restrictedpalette and mood of autumnal sadness, the two works are almostidentical. The only important differences are that the day-dreaminggirl in Rverie becomes an elderly woman in Twilight, while therising moon is replaced by the setting sun. Our picture is alsowell over four times as large as the later variant. In July 1882, shortly after it had been seen at the Salon, Rverieappeared in an important exhibition mounted in London by the FineArt Society to introduce Grez painters to the British public. Itwas the only O'Meara among the fourteen pictures, which alsoincluded two works by Stott, Sargent's El Jaleo (Isabella StewartGardner Museum, Boston) and portrait of Carolus-Duran (Sterling andFrancine Clark Institute, Williamstown, Mass.), and examples ofAlexander Harrison, Kenyon Cox, and others. The Magazine of Artfound the exhibition 'decidedly interesting', and described Rverieas 'a careful and intelligent reductio ad absurdum of the wholetheory and practice of art'. On this equivocal note, however, thepicture disappeared, entering a French private collection where ithas remained for nearly a hundred and twenty years, unseen by thegeneral public or even known to scholars.

(LIMITED EDITIONS CLUB.) O'Hara, Frank. Poems. Lithographs by Willem De Kooning on Kitakata paper. Large folio, gilt-lettered black morocco; cloth clamshell box. number 538 of 550 copies with De Kooning's authorized facsimile signature. New York, 1988 Estimate $1,500-2,500