A Breezy Day, Howth
Artist
Sir William Orpen
(1878 - 1931)
Date1909
MediumOil on panel
Dimensions40 x 61 cm
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery.
Lane Bequest, 1913.
Object number109
Description'A Breezy Day, Howth' is one of a series of paintings which Orpen carried out between 1909 and the outbreak of the First World War, when he and his family spent the summer months at Howth, just northeast of Dublin Bay. Orpen was reintroduced to the beauty of the Dublin coastline by his friend, the writer Oliver St. John Gogarty.This painting depicts the artist's wife Grace sheltering from the strong winds on the headland of Howth, and beyond her view across the Dublin Bay with the Dublin Mountains in the distance. It was a time of great happiness for the artist and his painting reflects his buoyant mood. In general, though he was familiar with Impressionism, Orpen rated the importance of drawing too highly to truly engage with its tenets. However, in the Howth series of paintings the artist indulges an intense interest. These rapidly painted, impressionistic, light-filled canvases, in which he variously portrayed his wife and daughters walking on the cliffs, swimming and sunbathing among sand dunes, attempt an immediacy of response to the atmosphere comparable to Monet's plein-air figure studies of the 1880s.
(Catalogue Entry [23]: A Century of Irish Painting - Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1997, p. 149)
On View
Not on viewCollections
William Rothenstein
