Walter Frederick Osborne, R.H.A. 1859-1903

London, Royal Academy, 1891, no.137;

Liverpool, Autumn Exhibition, 1891, no.262.

Jeanne Sheehy, Walter Osborne, Ballycotton 1974, p. 130, no.303;
Eamonn Mallie, ed., One Hundred Years of Irish Art, Nicholson and Bass 2000, p.248, illustrated p.249.

Although he did not return permanently to Dublin until 1892, Osborne made regular visits to the Irish capital throughout his years in England. On these occasions he haunted the poor streets of one of the oldest parts of the city. Here was a world far from the middle class gentility of Rathmines, the suburb where he grew up. Filled with market stalls, hand-carts and seedy shops, it lay between the two great cathedrals of Christ Church and St Patrick. Ragamuffins provided a foil to the drab setting; fruitsellers, fish merchants, hawkers and a tinker or two were parked on the pavements in front of taverns and tick shops. A rare customer, spending a few coppers, would attract a shoal of urchins, begging for farthings. Osborne’s sketchbooks were quickly filled. When, in 1887, Near St Patrick’s Close (fig 1) was painted, these ingredients were marshalled on a canvas which was to become a compositional archetype.

A church, in this case St Patrick’s, serves as the looming background presence in a grey street scene where an innocent walks past playing a penny whistle. Anxious to discover more, Osborne returned on subsequent visits and in 1890, looking up Patrick Street towards the river, made Christ Church Cathedral his reference point for Rags, Bones and Bottles. This ‘old Dublin street’ shortly to be ‘improved’ by Lord Iveagh, narrows and widens erratically. Looking northwards, the joining lanes on the left of the picture throw shafts of afternoon sunlight across it, touching the tower of Christ Church. Founded by Bishop Dúnán in 1028, the cathedral was, during Osborne’s teenage years in the 1870s, extensively re-modelled when the architect, George Edmund Street, financed by the distiller, Henry Roe, was asked to carry out restoration. A new Chapter House was built on the site of the old St Michael’s Church and linked to the cathedral by a bridge across the top of Winetavern Street. Today this gives a Victorian Gothic rather than late Romanesque or early Perpendicular appearance to the cluster of buildings. The restoration was not without its critics. It effectively placed a greater gulf between the ecclesiastical enclave and the slums that surrounded it, falling away to the Quays.

Nevertheless these downtrodden streets provided the painter with a seemingly endless supply of motifs. In the present work, a trader, in overcoat and black apron is encircled by urchins. The idea for a group like this came from Cherry Ripe, exhibited at the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours in 1889 (fig 2). Thought to represent a street in Rye, this picture contains a pedlar in a fisherman’s smock surrounded by children.

In Rags, Bones and Bottles, the depiction of a child trailing a wooden toy, stalked by a puppy, reveals Osborne’s eye for detail and refers to earlier works such as Primary Education. Osborne’s great sensitivity to domestic pets was undoubtedly inherited from his father, the popular animal painter, William Osborne. Here too, the older bare-foot boy in back view, wearing a pale blue shirt is entirely typical. Such figures appear in his earliest works, acting as anchor points for the viewer and taking the eye into the space of the picture.

The present work for instance, anticipates the pastel, Life in the Streets, Hard Times (fig 3), Osborne’s Royal Academy exhibit of 1892 that was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest. This also presents a view of Patrick Street showing the tower of Christ Church Cathedral. In the foreground clearly visible in a study drawing (fig 4), sits a trader wearing a bowler hat, scarf, apron and overcoat, similar to that of the man in the present work. This setting was further explored in the magisterial Life in the Streets – Musicians, now known as The Fish Market, Patrick Street, 1894 (fig 5). For this whole group of pictures, with the exception of the present work, Osborne experimented with generic titles ‘The Dublin Streets’ or ‘Life in the Streets’ hoping to identify a consistent theme by which his work would easily be recognized. The compelling nature of this topography contributed to his permanent return to the city of his birth.

Rags, Bones and Bottles predicts this return. Compare this with the pictures of fashionable faubourgs by Jean Béraud, or the civic spaces around St Paul’s painted at the same time by William Logsdail, and there are no barefoot children to be seen. Dublin, one of the most impoverished places in the world in the 1890s, could never match the opulence of Paris and London. Having missed out on the Industrial Revolution, visitors at the turn of the century noted that its crumbling Georgian magnificence was bankrupt. As Rags, Bones and Bottles uniquely demonstrated to its London audience back in the year of Parnell’s downfall, not only was Dublin decayed, but in its genial proto-Joycean encounters between ragamuffins and merchants’ runners, there was ‘life in the streets’. Within two years, Galway would replace the ‘Little England’ villages of the Home Counties, but by this time, Osborne had already received his calling as the poet-painter of Dublin’s poor.

Kenneth McConkey