The work of the artist Charles McAuley, who died on September 30th, aged 89, was inseparable from the Glens of Antrim, where he spent virtually his entire life. Although that beautiful region has featured in paintings by several other Ulster artists, notably James Humbert Craig, Frank McKelvey and Maurice Wilks, Charles McAuley could fairly have claimed to be the artist of "the Glens"; for his native knowledge of the local landscape and people brought to the best of his work a special quality of emotion. Yet it is not a claim he would have made for himself, for self-promotion was a trait absent from his personality.
He was born on a small farm at Lubatavish, Glenaan, near Cushendall, the youngest of eight children in a family whose forebears had inhabited the Glens for many generations. His gift for drawing emerged early and was noted by an art inspector at the little primary school which stood only a stone's throw from his home.
A key encounter came in his mid-teens, when Humbert Craig, who was arts adjudicator at the Feis na nGleann, praised several of his youthful paintings, telling him: "You go ahead with this, and you'll do well." He spent a brief period at Belfast College of Art, but, in his own words, "I didn't like the city." In 1940 he married Peggy O'Loan, and the couple raised four children in a house overlooking the sea at Dalriada, on the edge of Cushendall village. Having lived to paint, Charles McAuley now had to paint to live - a challenging task at a time when art was undervalued, especially in a rural environment remote from the support of commercial galleries. In addition, he was not cut out to be a salesman and for several decades his work remained under-priced by comparison with that of more fashionable contemporaries.
The past quarter-century, however, has seen a steady rise in the prices paid both for new paintings - which he continued to produce almost to the end - and for works from his prime, traded at auctions in Belfast and Dublin. Last June, for example, a McAuley watercolour sold for £5,800 sterling at Ross's of Belfast - a sum that would have seemed inconceivable to the struggling artist of the 1940s and 1950s.
Throughout his career, he found his subject matter in the landscape and people around him: men and women working in the fields and farmhouses - scything grass, pulling lint, shearing sheep, herding cattle, ironing clothes; fishermen on the shore; people stopping on the road to gossip - a subject often handled with a touch of affectionate humour. It was a way of life that was disappearing even as he depicted it; he was saddened by the depopulation of the Glens and in his paintings he often brought long-derelict homes back to life.
Charles McAuley's reputation received a particular boost in 1984 with the publication by the Glens of Antrim Historical Society of The Day of the Corncrake, in which 25 colour reproductions of his paintings were coupled with 30 poems about the Glens by John Hewitt. In a foreword, Hewitt wrote that his "awareness was not merely graphic but demographic. This has made him for me the authentic regional artist, the painter who belongs to and finds his themes in a known place. Nowadays, with the rapid flow of international styles succeeding each other, this is a distinctive title one can seldom confer." In person Charles McAuley was a gentle, shy man, almost reclusive in his last years, but unfailingly hospitable to visitors. In a BBC television film made in the mid-1980s, he remarked that he might have enjoyed more success if he had made a career in the wider world, but that he certainly would not have been happier: "I've spent my boyhood and manhood in the Glens. . .and I have no desire to leave them until I die."
He is survived by his daughter, Una, his three sons, Turlough, Bernard and Henry, and by his sister Brigid.
Charles McAuley: born 1910; died September, 1999.