Seán Keating

Seán Keating (Born John Keating, Limerick, September 28, 1889 – Dublin, December 21, 1977) was an Irish romantic-realist painter who painted some iconic images of the insurrectionary period and of the early industrialization of Ireland. He spent part of each year on the Aran Islands and his many portraits of island people depicted them as rugged heroic figures.

Seán Keating studied drawing at the Limerick Technical School before a scholarship arranged by William Orpen allowed him to go at the age of twenty to study at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. Over the next few years he spent time on the Aran Islands and then in London, at Orpen's studio. In 1916 he returned to Ireland where he documented the war of independence and the subsequent civil war. Examples include "Men of the South" (1921) which shows a group of IRA men ready to ambush a military vehicle and "An Allegory" (c. 1922) which uses an unlikely clustering of figures to represent the fractures in the nascent Irish state.

He was elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1923. One of the cardinal achievements of the Irish Free State in the latter half of the 1920s was the building, in partnership with Siemens AG, of a hydro-electric power generator at Ardnacrusha, near Limerick. Keating produced a considerable number of paintings related to this scheme, as with all his paintings, these are realistic in style, some are literal and some are allegorical compositions seeking to communicate his view of the construction work as an heroic, even mythological, act.

In 1939 he was commissioned to paint a mural for the Irish pavilion at the New York World's Fair. He was President of the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1949 to 1962 and showed at the annual show every year for 61 yrs from 1914. Although Keating was an intellectual painter in the sense that he consciously set out to explore the visual identity of the Irish nation and his paintings show a very idealized realism; he did have conservative views on art and exerted an influence against modern art in Ireland. Keating feared that the modern movement would bring back a decline in artistic standards. Throughout his career he exhibited nearly 300 works at the RHA, and also showed at the Oireachtas. [Snoddy, Theo. Dictionary of Irish Artists: 20th Century, 2nd Edition. Merlin Publishing, Dublin, Ireland, 2002. Pg.300-03. Retrieved Mar. 26, 2008.]

Work in collections

* The Electrical Supply Board in Ireland.
* The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, including
** "An Allegory" (c.1922)
* The Crawford Gallery, Cork, including
** [http://www.crawfordartgallery.com/Paintings/SKeating.html "Men of the South" (1921)]
* Trinity College Dublin including
** [http://www.tcd.ie/Physics/Schrodinger/Portrait.html "Portrait of Edwin Schrödinger"]
* Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, including
** "Kelp Burners"

References

* Peter Murray (2002), "Keating, Seán" in Brian Lalor (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillian. ISBN 0-7171-3000-2
* Bruce Arnold (1977), "Irish Art, a Concise History" (2nd Ed.), London: Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0-500-20148-X

External links

* [http://www.rte.ie/culture/millennia/people/keatingsean.html Short biography on the RTÉ site]
* [http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/k/Keating,Sean/life.htm Biographical notes on the Princess Grace site]
* [http://www.whytes.ie/4ImageDisplay.asp?AUCTION=20060425&
]