Skip to main content
Collections Menu
Rubbish Dump
Rubbish Dump

Rubbish Dump

Artist (1900 - 1981)
Date1958
MediumOil on board
Dimensions45.8 x 61 cm
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Kirkpatrick Bequest through the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, 1982. © The Estate of Nano Reid.
Object number1484
DescriptionThe swirling chaotic world presented in the 'Rubbish Dump' with its bird's eye view of a landscape in which emblematic images of a boat, a horse, and a figure pouring refuse down a hillside all merge together is typical of her mature style. Painted in 1958, it relies on a strong and assured manipulation of paint and an exaggeration of line and colour for its visual effects. Reid's personal brand of Expressionism, which has been termed post-Yeatsian, is characterised by an emphasis on line, a richness and subtlety of colour and a unique form of lyricism. Seán O Faolain, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition held in her honour in Dublin and Belfast in 1974, aptly described her as 'something of a poetic visionary, writing in code about things behind the seen surface, an imagination nurtured in the Boyne Valley whose rich uplands and ancient stones silently murmur ancestral memories'.

(Extract from 'Images and Insights', Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1993, p. 116)
On View
Not on view
Cats in the Kitchen
Nano Reid
c. 1952
William Cosgrave
Sir John Lavery
1923
Avignon from the West
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
c. 1836
The Tipperary Hurler
Seán Keating
1928
Child in a Yard
Louis le Brocquy
1953
Cinderella Dressing Her Ugly Sister
Wilhelmina Margaret Geddes
c. 1910
The Grey Fan
Charles Conder
Jim Larkin
Mina Carney
c. 1930
The Life of St Colman MacDuagh (left panel)
Wilhelmina Margaret Geddes
1911
The Life of St Colman MacDuagh (middle panel)
Wilhelmina Margaret Geddes
1911
The Life of St Colman MacDuagh (right panel)
Wilhelmina Margaret Geddes
1911