Aloysius O'Kelly (1850-1929)
Portrait of a Young Breton Girl
Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 63.5cm (36 x 25'')
Signed and dated 1905

Exhibited: Re-orientations, Aloysius OKelly: Painting, Politics...

Aloysius O'Kelly (1850-1929)
Portrait of a Young Breton Girl
Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 63.5cm (36 x 25'')
Signed and dated 1905

Exhibited: Re-orientations, Aloysius OKelly: Painting, Politics and Popular Culture, Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 19992000, no 25.

Literature: Niamh OSullivan, Re-orientations, Aloysius OKelly: Painting, Politics and Popular Culture, Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 19992000; and Aloysius OKelly: Art, Nation, Empire, Field Day, 2010.

In the late nineteenth century, OKelly embraced increasingly naturalistic concerns, but this iridescent painting is more modernist than usual from OKelly. The young girl is treated as an integrated element in the landscape, saturated with hot colour. Nineteenth-century paintings of Bretons show women wearing distinctive white linen coiffes and wide collars, dark skirts, waisted bodices, embroidered waistcoats, and heavy wooden sabots, but this modern Mademoiselle is informal in her bare feet, and modern in her dress, showing the evolution of peasant life in Brittany at the turn of the twentieth century.

Niamh OSullivan May 2017

 

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