Walter Frederick Osborne

The Frederick Gallery, Dublin, 1983;
Adams, Dublin, 25 September 2013, lot 15;
Private collection

Dublin Art Club, 1889, no.30;
Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, Walter Osborne, 1983, no.33 with tour to Ulster Museum, Belfast;
The Frederick Gallery, Dublin, June 1983, p.85, illustrated;
Clandeboye, The Ava Gallery, The French Connection, August - September 2012, no.30, with tour to the Hunt Museum, Limerick, September - October 2010

Jeanne Sheehy, Walter Osborne, Ballycotton, 1974, no.180

The board appears to be sound. A couple of very faint signs of craquelure to the grouped figure in right foreground, only visible upon close inspection; otherwise the work appears in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals some retouchings to the edges, some infillings to the sky and around the sun, and some small flecks to the standing woman near right edge and to the elder woman kneeling down. Held in a gilt plaster frame.
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The present picture, painted in 1888 when Walter Osborne was working in England, is reminiscent of Jules Bastian Lepage’s 1877 masterpiece, Season d’Octobre, now housed in the National Gallery of Victoria. Osborne had met the pioneering en plein air realist at Concarneau in the summer of 1882 when he was living in Brittany and, like many young British and Irish artists, was greatly influenced by the Frenchman’s radical peasant naturalism. Leaving France for England in 1883, Osborne continued to paint rural genre scenes en plein air, moving between small agrarian communities in the home counties: ‘living in the open air, painting from morning to night, and lodging sometimes in a cottage, sometimes in a village inn’. (Stephen Gwynn, Garden Wisdom, 1921, p. 31.)

Potato Gathering, in which a group of peasants harvest their potato crop at sunset, is typical of this particularly fruitful stage of Osborne’s career, and was likely painted outside Uffington, in Oxfordshire, where the artist spent the summer of 1888 accompanied by his artist-friend Blandford Fletcher. While ostensibly sharing its subject with Lepage’s earlier picture, Osborne’s treatment serves to differentiate the two artist’s objectives. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Osborne remained distinctly ambivalent to the social and political agenda of French realism, reserving his admiration largely for the tradition’s rural aesthetic. Bastien-Lepage, following Jean Francois Millet, was primarily concerned with the condition of the labourer, for Osborne on the other hand the potato gatherers are subordinate to the landscape as a whole.

Stylistically too it deviates from the Frenchman, whose pictures are characterised by a high horizon, achieved by painting standing up, and by an even application of lighting. While Osborne adopted these techniques in early pictures, he had all but abandoned them by the late 1880s, and much of the success of his later pictures is owed to a skilful handling of light and shade.  In Potato Gathering, Osborne uses this contrast to great atmospheric effect: the dusky pink of the fields beyond leaves the foreground and the figures obscured by semi-darkness. The picture was exhibited at the Dublin Art Club in 1889 where it drew comparisons with another social realist, Frederick Walker, an artist Osborne greatly admired. One critic enthusiastically claimed:

Mr Osborne has excelled himself. This painting is, without exception, one of the best the artist has ever painted. Reminding us somewhat of the late Frederick Walker's best landscape, it is yet thoroughly original, and the lucky purchaser of the "Potato gatherers" may congratulate himself upon the possession of a work of high art perfect in every respect. This is one of the gems of the collection.