ART HISTORY - Aloysius O'Kelly: Art, Nation, Empire by Niamh O'SullivanField Day Publications/University of Notre Dame, 358pp, €35

A lengthy, critical biography of the artist Aloysius O’Kelly – including paintings, watercolours and graphic work from the 1880s – offers serious insight into a man who spent much of his time covering his tracks

IN 1999, Niamh O'Sullivan curated an exhibition on Aloysius O'Kelly (1853-1836) at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, which was the most radical reappraisal of a pre-20th-century Irish artist in recent years. It not only alerted us to a career and an oeuvre that had been almost forgotten, but her exhibition and its catalogue subjected the artist to an intensity of political readings that left one intrigued and curious. I, for one, wanted more sustained information on an artist whose family connections brought him into close contact with serious revolutionaries of the second half of the 19th century, while his work for both the London Illustrated Newsand the Pictorial Worldoffered, as she argued, a subversive take on contemporary political activities in Ireland and the Sudan, respectively.

Now, a decade later, aided by a splendidly produced book from Field Day with monies from the AIB, O’Sullivan has written a lengthy critical biography of O’Kelly supplemented by an illustrated catalogue of his oil paintings, watercolours and graphic work from the 1880s.

O’Sullivan’s book is a work of painstaking scholarship and she has clearly been aided by many art dealers, gallery owners and the like in tracking down the work of an artist who seems to have spent a lot of his time covering his tracks and making a retrospective appreciation of his output very hard indeed. But she has put together a good story, which takes O’Kelly from his impoverished early years in Dublin on to a period in London, followed by a stint in Paris as a student with the realist academician Jean-Léon Gérôme.

A number of years were spent working for the London Illustrated News, living by Lough Fee in Connemara, where he produced a fascinating series of drawings that detailed the actions of the Land War and some imaginatively non-stereotypical oil paintings of life on the western seaboard.

This Irish period culminated in his exhibition in the Paris Salon of 1884 of Mass in a Connemara Cabin(now on loan to the National Gallery of Ireland), the first painting of an Irish subject matter exhibited in that prestigious venue since its inauguration in the early 18th century.

The mid to late 1880s saw O’Kelly in the Sudan and in Cairo, where he chronicled the British campaign against the Mahdi and depicted scenes of Egyptian life in what O’Sullivan concedes is an Orientalist style but which she warns us, “did not make him an imperialist”.

As with many late 19th-century artists, Brittany had always attracted him as a site for artistic inspiration and over the years O’Kelly made many long visits to the area, where he befriended the Cork-born American artist Thomas Hovenden and painted any number of canvases of Breton scenes.

Eventually, in 1895, O’Kelly emigrated to New York and was naturalised as an American citizen in 1901. In the USA, he painted pictures inspired by Mark Twain and autumns in Maine; he died in 1936.

Niamh O’Sullivan subtitles her book “Art, Nation, Empire”, and we certainly get some excellent discussion of all three. My concern is that “Nation” and “Empire” seem to have less to do with the large number of oil paintings and watercolours produced in both Brittany and America which are listed in the catalogue. Known work in these media produced by Aloysius O’Kelly in France and the United States account for well over half his oeuvre (about 140 out of a listed 224).

The engraved prints of both Irish and Sudanese subject matter after O’Kelly’s original drawings come to about 40, while his Irish and North African/Middle Eastern scenes number in the 50s. Such simple maths does not prove very much except that we perhaps need to tread carefully in seeing O’Kelly as always acting “against the grain”.

As O’Sullivan rightly points out, O’Kelly learnt much from Gérôme and they were both genre painters who achieved what she calls “a similar crystalline pellucidity”.

Her chapter on O’Kelly in Ireland in the 1880s during a period of serious land agitation is very well told as is her careful and often painstaking explanation of wood engravings.

Equally, O’Sullivan’a chapters on O’Kelly’s time in Africa are measured and she makes a good case for the artist offering an alternative form of Orientalism. The problem arises with the rest of O’Kelly’s career; after Ireland and Africa, he turns into a rather unexceptional genre painter of Breton peasants and pleasant New England views.

Niamh O’Sullivan displays great admiration for her subject and continually requests us to remember Aloysius O’Kelly’s republican background.

As such, O’Sullivan asks us, sometimes with the help of theorists such as Roland Barthes, to consider the “inherent ambivalences in even the most realistic images which allow them to be read in different ways, making them palatable to audiences on both sides of the divide”. Here she is referring to O’Kelly images of the Irish Land War but it is an observation that we are invited to consider throughout this book. Such an exhortation is welcome as O’Sullivan shows great determination in exploring a complex life, a confusing corpus of work and a story which is sometimes close to a boy’s own adventure.

In offering serious insight into an artist who seems to have perversely made such an exploration difficult, Niamh O’Sullivan asks us to always remember that art history is politically potent and relevant to the national story.

Fintan Cullen is professor of art history at the University of Nottingham. His next book carries the working title of I reland on Show: Art, Union, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century