Seán Keating PRHA HRA (1889-1978) 'I Gave Him a Smoke' Oil on board, 92 x 77cm (36¼ x 30¼'') Signed Provenance: The Imperial Gallery of Art, London, 1929; Seán Keating Retrospective Royal...

Seán Keating PRHA HRA (1889-1978) 'I Gave Him a Smoke' Oil on board, 92 x 77cm (36¼ x 30¼'') Signed Provenance: The Imperial Gallery of Art, London, 1929; Seán Keating Retrospective Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Nov/Dec 1989, Cat. No. 11 Literature: John Millington Synge, Playboy of the Western World, (1927, illustrated p65 Commissioned by the executors of the John Millington Synge Estate in 1922, I Gave Him a Smoke is one of ten paintings made by Seán Keating to illustrate The Playboy of the Western World, published by George Allen and Unwin in 1927. The paintings feature students and friends from the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, and several actors from productions of the play at the Abbey Theatre. Notably, Keating appears throughout the series as Old Mahon, the man who was supposedly killed by his erstwhile son. The story is well-known, and I Gave Him a Smoke refers to a point in the play during which Old Mahon has, apparently, returned from the dead, and is entertaining the Widow Quin with stories about his son's cowardice and lack of masculinity. He tells the Widow that Christy was so feeble that he would 'get drunk on the smell of a pint.' He goes on to say that his son's stomach was so weak that when he gave him three pulls from his pipe '...he was taken with contortions till I had to send him in the ass-cart to the females' nurse...' The painting illustrates those lines; it shows Keating, as Old Mahon, having a smoke from his clay pipe while his gormless son writhes in anguish on the ground. The ass-cart waits in the background, ready to take Christy to the worst place imaginable for a man in those days - to the nurse who dealt with girls and women - a dreadful comedown for the man hailed as a hero for committing patricide. The illustrated edition of Synge's play, which was described as a comedy in three acts, was published in an edition of one thousand copies. I Gave Him a Smoke is reproduced on page 65. Dr Éimear O'Connor HRHA Research Associate TRIARC-Irish Art Research Centre TCD. Éimear O'Connor's book, Seán Keating: Art, Politics and Building the Irish Nation is published in full colour by Irish Academic Press, and is available in paperback, hard back (limited edition) and hard back slip cased (limited edition).

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