Portrait of a Breton child

Aloysius O'Kelly was born in Dublin and in 1874 he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, studying under Gérôme. In the 1870s and 80s he spent time in Brittany. Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin comment that O'Kelly's Breton portraits 'are among his most powerful paintings, and must number amongst the most striking images by an Irish artist of the late nineteenth century' (Ireland's Painters 1600-1940, New Haven and London, 2002, p. 260).