George Campbell was born in Co Wicklow in 1917, but he grew up in Belfast and is generally regarded as a Northern Irish artist, one of group of Northerners, in fact, who made up a progressive force in the context of Irish art of the mid-20th century.
He had been painting full-time for a few years when, in 1946, he came into contact with a number of Spaniards who had settled in Dublin. His first paintings of Spanish subjects were actually made in London, when he made studies of visiting dancers in traditional costume. When he eventually visited Spain, at the beginning of the 1950s, he was immediately smitten with the country, the people and the culture.
When he wasn't there, he later said in a documentary on his work, he thought about Spain for a third or even half of the day. It should be said that he was also thoroughly at home in the west of Ireland (he was a capable musician as well), and painted happily there and elsewhere.
He was closely associated with Arthur Armstrong and, while neither was particularly avant-garde in their methods, they had a refreshingly open-minded approach to painting, incorporating elements of Cubism and other modernist innovations. They were also outsiders to some extent, and never completely identified with either wing of the Irish art world, the RHA or the Living Art. Like Armstrong, Campbell produced much fine work. He died in 1979, and his reputation is likely to rise as time goes by.