Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 21st October 2019

84 57 Daniel O’Neill (1920-1974) The Storm signed top right oil on board 51 x 61cm (20 x 24in) Provenance: John Ross & Co, Belfast, 11th October 1995; Private Collection €25,000-35,000 (£22,123-30,973) A painter with a strong Romantic vision, O’Neill often used stormy skies, dark seas and derelict or abandoned buildings to enhance the sense of mood in his paintings. His work is full of a sense of loneliness and introspection, his figures often set in desolate or nocturnal landscapes. O’Neill was affected not only by the bombing of Belfast in a series of German air raids in 1941, but also by the threat of nuclear annihilation that gripped the world in the years after World War II, during the Cold War. His is a humanist but pessimistic mood shared by writers such as Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin. In this dark and tempestuous work, O’Neill expresses many of his fears and anxieties about humanity, and the destruction wrought by warfare. To the left of the composition, a ruined house in a desolate landscape is depicted as a series of jagged angles, conjuring up memories of O’Neill’s younger years as an artist, when he salvaged timber from bombed houses in Belfast, to use as supports for his paintings. To the right, silhouetted against white storm clouds, a horse rears above the figure of a fleeing boy, his head turned to look back towards the scene of destruction. As with most of O’Neill’s paintings, the location, and the identity of the sitter in The Storm, is not revealed. Born in 1920, the son of an electrician, O’Neill was himself trained as an apprentice electri- cian, and worked for a time in the Belfast shipyards. He also worked as a housepainter. How- ever, to further his interest in art, he took evening classes in life drawing at the Belfast College of Art. He became friendly with the artist Gerard Dillon, and worked for a time in the studio of fellow-Belfast artist Sidney Smith. The first exhibition of O’Neill’s paintings was held in 1941, at the Mol Gallery in Belfast, and shortly afterwards he was taken on by the Victor Waddington Gallery in Dublin, which provided an income, allowing him to paint full time. In 1949, O’Neill visited Paris, seeing at first hand the work of painters such as Vlaminck and Utrillo. In the early 1950s he moved with his wife and child to the village of Conlig, Co Down, where the artists George Campbell and Gerard Dillon were also living and working, and became a member of the Ulster Contemporary Group. In 1958 O’Neill moved to London and travelled on the Continent, a decade later he was in Dublin, designing stage sets for Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock. In the early 1970’s he returned to Belfast, but the outbreak of the ‘Troubles’ affected him badly, as did the resulting closure of his gallery, the McClelland Gallery, and he died in 1974, aged just fifty-four years. Peter Murray, September 2019