Next December will see the 10th anniversary of painter Niccolo Caracciolo's death, and as if to mark this occasion, the James Adam salerooms are offering no less than three of his pictures in Wednesday's sale of Irish art. Despite his name, Caracciolo was Irish by both birth and temperament.
His father, Ferdinando Caracciolo, Prince of Cursi, was married to a Fitzgerald of The Island, near Waterford, which was the artist's childhood home. Seemingly, he showed no early interest in painting until driven by boredom to take up brushes one day; Pietro Annigoni saw one of his pictures and gave encouragement.
The connection with Annigoni and with his father's family meant that he also maintained links with Italy, and it was outside Siena that he died, aged 48, in a car crash in 1989. Almost at the start of his career he worked on the film The Agony and the Ecstasy, recreating Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. In Ireland, he exhibited first with the Lad Lane Gallery and later with the Solomon Gallery; his final show with the latter was held a mere month before his death.
In a posthumous Irish Times appreciation, it was written of Caracciolo that "his overwhelming characteristic was that of a most courteous gentleman." This characteristic is also apparent in his work, which has a consistently gentle style, deriving primarily from the softly diffused light in which his landscapes are invariably bathed.
Caracciolo was not an innovator; his paintings often look as though they might have been produced in the last century, perhaps by one of the northern European artists who settled in Rome and looked to the Campagna for inspiration.
The three works being sold at Adam's - all dating from spring 1989 - share this quality. Two are views of the north side of St Stephen's Green in Dublin, one of them showing the Shelbourne Hotel and both showing expanses of grass populated by a mere handful of figures beneath azure skies. Lots 127 and 129 have estimates of £5,000-£6,000 and £4,000-£5,000 respectively. The third picture (lot 44, £10,000-£15,000), a downstream view of Dublin's O'Connell Bridge, shows the River Liffey but it might almost be the Tiber or Arno, so mellow is the light reflecting on the water and the honey-hued stone of the bridge and quays.
Caracciolo's is something of an ideal world, untroubled by contemporary problems of noise, pollution, graffiti and bustle. In this respect, the artist was working within a long-established Irish tradition which is represented by other pictures in the Adam's sale.
A similar stillness pervades lot 52, a Kerry coastal landscape by Paul Henry (£30,000-£50,000), as well as the earlier On the Malahide Sands by Nathaniel Hone (lot 88, £25,000-£35,000). Similar in colouring and theme alike is lot 94, Walter Osborne's view of Walberswick on the Suffolk coast (£12,000-£18,000), which seems to suggest that, as with Caracciolo, Irish artists have a habit of taking their sensibility with them wherever they go. The lots are on view from tomorrow and the sale begins next Wednesday at 2.15 p.m.
