“Feeding the Chickens” (1885) by Walter Osborne, 1859

Feeding the Chickens

Walter Osborne, 1859–1903

1885

Oil on canvas

36 x 28 inches (91.5 x 71 cm.)

Signed and dated “Walter Osborne 85,” lower left

Provenance: George McCulloch; Mr Shaw, Rathgar, Co. Dublin; Private Collection

Exhibited: London, Guildhall, Works of Irish Painters, 1904 (39); London, Royal Academy of Arts, Winter Exhibition, the McCulloch collection of Modern Art, 1909; Dublin, The National Gallery of Ireland, Walter Osborne, 1983 (19)

Source: The Fine Art Society 2014

See commentary below

The Fine Art Society, London, has most generously given its permission to use information, images, and text from its catalogues in the Victorian Web. This generosity has led to the creation of hundreds and hundreds of the site's most valuable documents on painting, drawing, sculpture, furniture, textiles, ceramics, glass, metalwork, and the people who created them. The copyright on text and images from their catalogues remains, of course, with the Fine Art Society. [GPL]

Commentary

‘Now I am pretty far advanced on a kit-kat of a girl in a sort of farmyard, a rough sketch on the opposite page will indicate the composition. The figure of the girl which is a little over two feet high is coming towards finish, but the immediate foreground with poultry is merely sketched in as yet. The fowl are very troublesome, and I have made some sketches but will have to do a lot more as they form rather an important part of the composition.’* Walter Osborne was one of a group of plein air naturalists working in England in the 1880s. He was born in Dublin and studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux Arts, Antwerp and worked in Pont-Aven in 1883 and elsewhere in northern France before settling in England.

This work, one of his finest, was painted at North Littleton, near Evesham in Worcestershire, where he was with the artists Edward Stott and Nathaniel Hill. Like George Clausen, Osborne grew up in the city, and made a conscious choice to seek subjects in the countryside and to paint directly from the motif. He was attracted to Nature, rather than to a particular locality where he had become rooted. Like Clausen too, in this study of a local girl, he chose a particular model for this painting.

Her name was Bessie Osborne (no relation of the artist), and she was painted in the open air in weather so cold that she nearly fainted and had to be sent home. His letter to his father suggests the close attention to detail with which he planned this painting. The finished work demonstrates the intensity of its creation.

It appears that it was not exhibited before 1909, six years after Osborne’s death. There was a major exhibition of Walter Osborne’s work at the National Gallery Ireland in 1983, the first such show since his Memorial Exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1903. Although considered one of Ireland’s greatest painters, it was among his British contemporaries as a whole, that he found his place in terms both of the nature of his work and their admiration. Alma-Tadema was one of a long list of artists who bought his painting An October Morning, also painted in 1885, as a memorial to him for the Corporation of London Art Gallery, after his death. The artists included those with whom he most closely shared an artistic vision, such as Stanhope Forbes, La Thangue, Edward Stott and other members of the Newlyn School.

Bibliography

The Fine Art Society 2014. Exhibition Catalogue. Edinburgh: Bourne Fine Art; London: The Fine Art Society, 2014. No. 14.

Sheehy, Jeanne. Walter Osborne. Ballycotton, 1974. no.83.

Last modified 31 May 2014