Thady, The Mayo Country Boy
Artist
Patrick Joseph Tuohy
(1894 - 1930)
Date1912
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions91.5 x 53.4 cm
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery.
Donated by Joseph Holloway, 1934.
Object number726
Description'Thady, The Mayo Country Boy' was Tuohy's earliest exhibited painting. He showed it at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1918 although he painted it several years earlier. An exceptional painting by the artist, aged eighteen years. It is undoubtedly a masterwork and shows what Tuohy was capable of when his mood was optimistic. Painted while on holiday in Tourmakeady, County Mayo, the artist took the landlady's son, Thady Derrig, as his model, and the bravura style of painting may have been influenced by a previous sighting of Roderic O'Conor's stylish Une Jeune Bretonne (Object Number 224), painted a decade earlier and presented by O'Conor to the Municipal Gallery in Dublin. The O'Brien family have now retitled the painting Thady, A Mayo Country Boy.
In a letter written about 1911 from Cappaduff, Tourmakeady, Co. Mayo (see Object Number 1690) to his friend James Sleator, he drew two small sketches of 'A Mayo Boy’, which he described as 'a portrait of a little boy in a red petticoat'. Many of Tuohy's early works in both oil and watercolour feature child models for which he had a great sensitivity. Above all he captures the innocence and vulnerability of youth. 'Thady, A Mayo Peasant Boy', with its rich use of colour and strong composition, was one of the artist's most successful works. It was among the works chosen for the exhibition of Irish art held in Paris in 1922, which was organised with the help of Maud Gonne McBride.
The painting may have in fact been painted in Ballaghadereen, Co. Roscommon.
On View
Not on view
