IS Daniel O'Neill the rising star of Irish art? Work by the Belfast-born painter, who died in 1974, has been performing particularly well at auction of late. Last Tuesday, an O'Neill oil on board, called Helen (right), sold at the de Veres sale in Dublin's RHA Gallagher Gallery for £26,000, more than double its pre-auction estimate of £9,000-£12,000.
Curiously, the same work had been sold by Phillips in London last November for sterling £7,475. According to John de Vere White, the picture was then bought by an English dealer, who put it into last week's sale. Meanwhile, earlier this month Ross's of Belfast sold O'Neill's The Sisters, pictured above (estimate sterling £18,000-£20,000), for £24,000 and the same artist's The Widow (£8,000-£12,000) for £15,000. Largely self-taught, O'Neill is usually associated with his friend and fellow-Northern Irish artist Gerard Dillon. The former was an electrician with the Belfast Corporation's transport department, where he worked on the night shift, using daytime for painting. Only after being given support by Victor Waddington in 1946 did he paint full-time.
The appeal of O'Neill's lushly-coloured and romantic pictures is immediate. A highly mannered figurative artist, his art was described by Brian Fallon in this newspaper in 1952 as being "dreamy, rather withdrawn, full of brooding beauties, erotic reverie, figures in half-light, flowers, moody interiors . . ." Always popular among Northern Irish collectors, Daniel O'Neill now seems to be attracting a wider circle of admirers in the Republic. It will be interesting to see the response to any of his pictures coming up for sale later this year.
