Life in Connemara, a Market Day

Painted in 1898, Life in Connemara, a Market Day depicts a lively market scene in Connemara, a coastal district in County Galway, Ireland. More specifically, the scene is likely set in the small fishing village of Roundstone, with its distinctive ‘L’-shaped harbour. Purchased directly from the Royal Academy in 1898, the present painting is in fact one of the rare pictures that Osborne sold when first exhibited, attesting to the strength of the work. Indeed, whilst Osborne has since achieved much posthumous success and was well respected amongst his artistic peers, during his lifetime many of his exhibited paintings remained unsold. Arguably it is in Osborne’s later works, such as the present lot, that the artist was really coming into his own stylistically, making his sudden and untimely death at the age of just 43 perhaps all the more tragic.

In Life in Connemara, A Market Day, we see the charming depiction of a regular market day for the people of Roundstone. Loosely painted figures gather on the waterfront, as local women sell goods from their baskets. Beyond, we see the rolling landscape of Connemara with its expansive hills and clear blue coastline, picked out in broad painterly brushstrokes. The most striking figures however are perhaps the local women, with their brightly coloured dresses and rich scarlet headscarves. The female figure to the lower left of the canvas in particular engages with the viewer, stopped it seems almost as if pausing for a photograph. The hustle and bustle of the market was a subject that Osborne revisited on numerous occasions, including in his notable Dublin market pictures of the 1890s, such as The Fishmarket, Patrick Street, 1893, which is now in the collection of the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. Whilst similar in subject matter, the rural Western Irish market scenes which inspired him at this time were much less sober than the Dublin ones, and as exemplified in Life at Connemara, A Market Day with its lively colour palette, more vividly painted. As the journalist and close friend of Osborne, Stephen Gwynn, noted in his 1943 article remembering Osborne, ‘somewhere in the nineties – he tried Galway, and artistically the result was enchanting. What drew him was the old town down by the quays and the picturesqueness of the Claddagh women and their fish baskets' (S. Gwynn, 'Walter Osborne and Ireland 1859-1903', An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 32, No. 128, December 1943, p. 465).

Life in Connemara, A Market Day was executed at a particularly interesting time in Osborne’s career, and during the 1890s there were several substantial shifts to his style. The piece still somewhat follows in the tradition of natural plein air painting that preoccupied him for much of his early years as an artist, and thematically, rural communities had been a thread running throughout Osborne’s work from his earliest years as a painter. However, following his move to Dublin in 1895, surrounded by new influences and no longer in frequent contact with the plein air practitioners of his youth and the New English Art Club, Osborne transitioned to a much more adventurous manner of painting, with looser brushwork and a bolder palette. Here we see his use of bright colours, such as the bold red of the female figures’ scarves, and painterly brushstrokes bringing the busy scene to life, and there is a directness and confidence in the rendering of the figures. As Jeanne Sheehy notes in the exhibition catalogue for the National Gallery of Ireland's Osborne exhibition, in these later works we see that ‘This is a painter in full control of his medium and his expression’ (J. Sheehy, exhibition catalogue, Walter Osborne, Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, 1984, p. 98).