Aloysius O'Kelly RHA (1853-1936)
Inside the Chapel (The Chapel of Locmaria-an-Hent, Brittany)
Oil on canvas, 92 x 73cm (36¼ x 28¾")
Signed and dated 1905

Provenance: Sale, William Doyle Auctioneers,...

Aloysius O'Kelly RHA (1853-1936)
Inside the Chapel (The Chapel of Locmaria-an-Hent, Brittany)
Oil on canvas, 92 x 73cm (36¼ x 28¾")
Signed and dated 1905

Provenance: Sale, William Doyle Auctioneers, New York, 5 May 1994, lot no. 109; With Cynthia O'Connor Gallery, Dublin, July/August 1994 as Stained Glass Window, Brittany; Sale, Mealy's Auctioneers, Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny, 30 October 2010, lot no. 609

Exhibited: Possibly New York Watercolour Club, no. 3 as Devotion; Corcoran Biennial Exhibition, Washington, 1907, no. 178; Cynthia O'Connor Gallery, Dublin, 1994; Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, November 1999, no. 24 Illustrated

Literature: Niamh O'Sullivan, Aloysius O'Kelly, Art, Nation, Empire, Field Day Publication, University of Notre Dame, Dublin, 2010

Few artists match the Irish painter, illustrator and political activist Aloysius O’Kelly for intrigue. His involvement in republican politics —secret addresses, false identities, dangerous liaisons – began in Paris when he was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts. His admission to the prestigious studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme, as well as the private studio of Joseph-Florentin Bonnat added to his pedigree as an young artist of note in the 1870s. In turn, he brought Irish interests to bear on French cultural life. His chef d’oeuvre, Mass in a Connemara Cabin, was the first painting of an Irish subject ever exhibited in the Paris Salon when it was shown there in 1884.

Summer holidays were spent in Brittany, away from the academic strictures of the École. There, artists from all nationalities immersed themselves in more naturalistic modes of representation. In Brittany, O’Kelly reconciled a range of styles derived from both traditional and avant-garde art, in effect blending academic, realist and plein-air elements into an innovative mode of rural naturalism.

This painting, and a number of others representing religious devotion are set in the pilgrimage chapel of Locmaria-an-hent in the commune of Saint Yvi, between Pont-Aven and Quimper. Renowned for its stained glass, the church was built in the sixteenth century and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. O’Kelly imbues the stained glass with a vibrant prismatic quality (an earlier version, Interior of a Church in Brittany (National Gallery of Ireland), painted in the late 1870s, is more ethnographic in character).

In paintings of religious subjects – what were considered superstitious rituals and strange religious customs – contemporary right-wing critics perceived the profound piety of the people, while left-wing critics saw nothing more than a display of the picturesque. But all agreed, the ‘soul’ of the race was visible in the features of Breton worshippers. O’Kelly’s 1905 painting, would have appealed to those who gave religious piety primacy.

According to critic Henry Blackburn, Bretons had only three vices (avarice, contempt for women and drunkenness) in contrast to five virtues (love of country, resignation to the will of God, loyalty, perseverance and hospitality). Nowhere are there ‘finer peasantry; nowhere do we see more dignity of aspect in field labour; nowhere more picturesque ruins’, he argued. But, he equivocated, Bretons are ‘behindhand in civilization’, nowhere does one find such ‘primitive habitations and such dirt’. Such aspersions compare with those ascribed to the peasants of the west of Ireland at the time. Over time, jaundiced accounts of Breton stupidity, savagery and superstition were transformed into sociological studies of Breton poverty, primitivism and piety. But an artist less dependent on the popular stereotype, such as O’Kelly, would have been attuned to the realities of communities in transition, and been aware of the need for subtle correction in the representation of people afflicted by acute poverty. He thus paints the peasants of Brittany with the same respect and integrity he accorded their Irish counterparts. Indeed, he relished the Celtic historical, cultural and ethnic connections between Ireland and Brittany.

 

O’Kelly shows himself to have been an observer of the variety and elaborations of Breton dress. The women wear distinctive white linen coiffes and wide collars, dark skirts, fitted bodices, embroidered waistcoats, and heavy wooden sabots. The men wore woolen jackets, waistcoats, bragoù-bras, black gaiters and felt broad-rimmed hats The artist and ethnographer, René-Yves Creston has identified sixty-six principal styles of Breton dress and over 1,200 different kinds of coiffe revealing the rich typography of Breton dress in which almost infinitesimal variations identify the locality and status of the individual, and which articulated relationships of wealth, kinship and ethnicity.

 

Dr. Niamh O'Sullivan, November  2023

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