Unlike those other great Irish artists of the Twentieth Century - Jack B. Yeats and Patrick Collins - Tony O'Malley at least lived to enjoy some of the rewards of his long years of service to Irish art: a well-deserved status and reputation at home and abroad and, in latter years, a livelihood that recognised the financial value of his creativity.
It was not always so, however. Like many others in his field of endeavour, the image of the struggling artist applied to O'Malley in the lean early years after he abandoned a career in the bank for his true vocation.
The greatest impoverishment he and other artists suffered in those stultifying years was perhaps the lack of recognition. It was a time when artists in Ireland lived without praise, he told those who gathered to see him receive the Aosdána honour of Saoi in 1993.
Described by the art critic Brian Fallon in this newspaper today as "one of the real originals of his time", O'Malley came late to painting but continued into his youthful old age to produce work of dazzling beauty.
His life had its milestones: a long confrontation with TB in the Ireland of the Forties and Fifties; a decisive move to Cornwall where his work flourished and finally attracted some real attention, and a late but long and happy marriage to the Canadian painter Jane Harris.
Becoming, in his statesman years, the most prominent artist of his generation, O'Malley could be regarded as a Matisse with a Celtic eye, a genius of colour and form.
Moving from figure, landscape and still life painting to the more abstract images of the later work, the distinctive signature style he developed was always clearly his own, whether the canvass was filled with glorious luminance or the more sombre tones of which he was a real master.
"I had to speak to myself and answer to myself", the artist once declared in a commentary on his drawings.
As Brian Fallon writes today, O'Malley already "has a firm place in the hierarchy of Ireland's artists of the last 100 years."
Through his dedicated life and the extraordinary range of his art, Tony O'Malley will continue to speak to all who gaze upon the unique pictorial compositions he has left for posterity.