Perhaps the earliest known instance of an Irish artist changing his
name came to light after an exhibition of the Society of Artists of
Ireland in the former Parliament Building (now Bank of Ireland) in Dublin
in 1801, when it was discovered that an artist who was showing his works
under the name Oben was none other than James George O’Brien, whose
pieces had previously been ‘much admired’, but who had Germanicised
his name because foreign workmanship was preferred in the London market
at the time.(1) The decision to alter his artistic nom-de-palette he
had taken during the three years he spent in London where he had gone
after (and perhaps even because of) the 1798 rebellion.
O’Brien
must have been forty at the time, as he had already enlisted as a student
in the separate classes for figure and for landscape and ornament drawing
in the Royal Dublin Society’s Schools almost thirty years previously,
in 1773, before studying architectural drawing in 1778,(2) and winning
a medal in the landscape section the following year. This last snippet
of information we glean from Strickland,(3) who also tells us that O’Brien
was still alive in 1819, so that much of his life coincided with the
sixty-year reign of King George III (1760-1820). He may have been only
just in his early twenties when he first exhibited in London, if he
is to be identified as the Dublin painter O’Brien who is mentioned
in the catalogue of the Society of Artists in 1778 as offering a picture
entitled Venus soliciting Vulcan to make armour for her son.(4)
One
who must have been following O’Brien’s progress through the
Schools with some interest was a member of the Society’s Fine Arts
Committee, William Burton (1733-96),(5) who was involved in the Schools’
politics,(6) and for whom O’Brien’s experience in the various
departments made him ideally qualified for a project that Burton was
interested in progressing. This was a plan to publish albums of engravings
showing off the beauties of Ireland’s ancient monuments, as Francis
Grose(7) and Paul Sandby had already done for England and Wales in the
years 1773-1778, and which was to be the main objective of the Hibernian
Antiquarian Society that had been founded by Burton for that very purpose
early in 1779.(8) Because of internal friction, the Society folded up
in 1783, and the scheme never came to fruition, but much of the pictorial
material for it was used a decade later in the two volumes of Grose’s
Antiquities of Ireland that was published in parts between 1791 and
1796. O’Brien drawings that were used as the basis for engravings
in Grose are described in the accompanying text as being from the collection
of the Rt. Hon. William Conyngham—the name Burton adopted when
he inherited Slane Castle in 1781. It is very likely, therefore, that
these O’Brien drawings were not commissioned in the 1790s specifically
for Grose’s Antiquities but were, rather, collected around 1779-81
by Burton Conyngham for his ill-starred Antiquarian Society enterprise.
We
are fortunate that the Prints and Drawings Department of the National
Library preserves some of the originals on which the Grose engravings
were based in its collection of the antiquary Austin Cooper (1759-1830),(9)
who had bought some (if not all) of Burton Conyngham’s portfolio
of drawings around 1810. Though they are unsigned, they can be confidently
ascribed to O’Brien through the attributions in the letterpress
accompanying their engraved versions in the pair of Grose volumes. They
can, therefore, be claimed as O’Brien’s earliest known surviving
works. They are all of Kilkenny subjects—the bastion in the town
walls, the friary of St Francis (Fig 5), Jerpoint Abbey—and the
Black Abbey(10) (Fig 6) which, though not attributed directly by Grose,
is almost certainly the work of O’Brien. Here we see his training
in figure drawing and architecture being put to good use in the adults
measuring or sketching with children admiring the medieval ruins. Cooper
was himself a competent draughtsman and, in 1799, he copied drawings
of Kilkenny castles (tower-houses)(11) from now untraceable O’Brien
originals which were also probably collected by Burton Conyngham around
1780 as potential illustration material for his planned project.
St
Canice’s Cathedral in Kilkenny, which was another of the engravings
in Grose after a lost O’Brien original, was also the subject of
a drawing which O’Brien exhibited in Dublin with the Society of
Artists of Ireland in 1780,(12) along with a number of other Kilkenny
subjects (Gowran Abbey, Grennell [ presumably] Castle near Thomastown
and a view of Graiguenamanagh),(13) which he may have sketched while
collecting material for Burton Conyngham, or which he may have worked
up afterwards from that material. The evidence would appear to argue
for Burton Conyngham having been O’Brien’s first patron, giving
him the commission to do many drawings of ruined Kilkenny churches and
castles in the years around 1780, and it would not be surprising if
the county were also O’Brien’s native heath. It is not clear
what O’Brien was doing for the remainder of the 1780s, as there
is no work of his that we can ascribe to this period, but he re-emerges
in the early 1790s with a series of watercolours in which he manages
to combine successfully the fields of landscape, figure and architectural
drawing that he had obviously already begun to master two decades earlier.
Chronologically, the first of these is one of the Franciscan friary
in Adare, Co. Limerick, signed O’Brien and dated 1793,(14) with
an idyllic shepherd and shepherdess on the left tending their flock
of sheep in the centre foreground, as pairs of three rather spare trees
flank the medieval friary on the right. By the following year, his trees
had sprouted more luxuriant foliage, an effect which he apparently achieved
through the use of stopping-out fluid and gum arabic.(15) This lively
depiction of trees comes to the fore in one of the pairs of O’Brien
watercolours displayed last year in the Gorry Gallery in Dublin, which
originally came from the collection of the late Lord Farnham in Cavan.(16)
These show views at Bunclody in North Wexford, one of a bucolic scene
of peasants doing their washing in a stream beside a stone bridge (Fig
7), the other at Newtownbarry (Fig 8) nearby, depicting society ladies
walking with their offspring across a rustic wooden bridge beside a
raging torrent–two features which re-appear in O’Brien’s
later work. The other pair of watercolours shown in the Gorry Gallery
represent Bullock Castle near Dalkey in County Dublin, a dramatic location
that appealed to many artists at the time, and which introduces us to
the sailing boats which also recur occasionally in his work.
Two
years later, in 1796, O’Brien paid what may have been the first
of a number of visits to Beau Parc House overlooking the Boyne in County
Meath, owned at the time probably by Charles Lambart, MP, whose near
neighbour William Burton Conyngham of Slane Castle died the same year.
Beau Parc was to inspire some of O’Brien’s finest work. Fennor
Rock, just downstream from the house, seems to have fascinated him,
for he painted a number of variations of it over the years. The earliest
of these, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, is signed O’Brien
and dated 1796(17); another, in an Irish private collection,(18) is
also signed O’Brien but not dated, and is likely to be before 1801,
as all of the artist’s known works after 1800 seem to be signed
Oben. This latter version depicts a family outing on a horse-drawn vehicle
in the foreground with the rock on the other side of the river, whilst
that in the National Gallery has a group of figures at the bottom left
(a favourite compositional trick of O’Brien’s) standing at
the foot of the rock on the same side of the river. There are two further
renderings of the subject by O’Brien that are still preserved in
the house itself as part of the collection of the Earl of Mountcharles.
Both are dated 1797 and have attractive vignettes of groups of people
small in scale in comparison to the vastness of natural beauty surrounding
them. The same collection, incidentally, houses an O’Brien view
of Slane Castle in the form that James Wyatt had only recently given
it. But the most dramatic rendering of Fennor Rock is now in the Ulster
Museum in Belfast,(19) (Fig 2), where the brightly-coloured cliff looms
large in the midst of dense foliage on either side—a more intense
composition explained by the fact that it may well be five or ten years
later, as it is signed ‘J.G.Oben’. As such, it might be equated
either with the picture exhibited as No. 121 under the name Oben at
the Society of Artists’ exhibition at the former Parliament House
in 1801(20) mentioned above, or, more likely that described as View
of Fenor Rock on the River Boyne listed under Oben’s name in the
Catalogue of the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1811 in London.(21)
There
are also some other O’Brien/Oben works which, though not of Fennor
Rock, seem to have been inspired by the scenery of the Boyne around
Beau Parc House. One of these, signed J. G. Oben, may actually have
been painted from the window of the house, showing a gardener and a
roller on the lawn in front, against the backdrop of the river landscape
behind.(22) An even more evocative picture, entitled Study of a Willow
tree at Beau Parc on the Boyne, mentioned enthusiastically in Anne Croookshank
and Desmond FitzGerald’s book The Watercolours of Ireland, is now
in the Huntingdon Library in California (Inv. No. 59.55.976), showing
a willow on the right bank of the river with two swans and a carriage,
and women washing on the bottom left. This helps us to identify as the
Boyne a very similar watercolour, one of Oben’s finest, also with
two swans and a carriage (Fig 3), which is now in Lady Goff’s collection.
It was bought from the Cynthia O’Connor Gallery in 1980, along
with another of Oben’s masterpieces which is also in the same collection.
The title of this second picture is Beau Parc on the Boyne (Fig 9 );
like its companion, it unsigned and undated, and shows a family on the
bottom left, a donkey and a sailing boat, all overshadowed by wonderful
trees, the oak dominating the centre being worthy of Paul Sandby, who
Anne Crookshank and Desmond FitzGerald see as an influence on Oben.
One of the swan and carriage pictures just discussed may well be identical
with A willow backed by an oak on the Boyne listed as No. 107 in the
catalogue of the Society of Artists of Ireland exhibition in the former
Parliament House in 1801 already mentioned above.
In the same catalogue nos. 95 and 96 were Beau Park House on the Boyne
and Beau Park on the Boyne, which could be the same as one or other
of the pictures mentioned above. Further pictures of different Irish
subjects in that exhibition which I have not yet been able to locate
include O’Sullivan’s cascade, Killarney, The Glyn of the Downs
and Mr. Grattan’s Moss House at the Dargle. Put on display side-by-side
with these Irish scenes in the 1801 Exhibition were a number of other
watercolours depicting the Lake District, as well as North Wales, where
O’Brien had already worked five years earlier, in 1796, as we know
from his Beddgelert [or Bethyellam], near Mount Snowdon watercolour
now in the National Gallery of Ireland (Fig 1), which was presented
by the late Professor Frank Mitchell. It shows water rushing over rocks
and under a rustic bridge, reminiscent of the waterfall scene at Newtownbarry
of two years earlier. The National Gallery also has an unlocalised mountain
scene by Oben of 1806, which may well be one of his Welsh or Lake District
subjects. In the following year, 1802, Oben continued exhibiting works
from the same areas of Britain, one of which West Water, one of the
Lakes of Cumberland— was described in the Catalogue as ‘part
of Mr. Oben’s Tour through North Wales, etc, to be published and
engraved in Aquatint by himself’(23) —a plan which would doubtless
have helped to preserve more of his images for us, but which, sadly,
never came to fruition. His only known aquatint was a view cited by
Strickland as The City of Dublin, The Bay, Mountains, &c., the Royal
Canal and Foster Aqueduct of 1813, which must have been adapted from
a drawing of the aqueduct which Oben is recorded as having exhibited
as No. 393 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1811.(24) As noted
above, he also exhibited View of Fenor Rock there at the same time having,
the previous year, contributed a single Irish subject After Dinner on
the Dargle, Co. Wicklow. It is quite possible that some of these watercolours
may have been left over, unsold, from a large exhibition of ‘seventy
landscapes in water-colour, mostly views in Ireland, Wales and the North
of England’ which Strickland tells us was held at O’Brien’s
own house at 49 Marlborough Street in Dublin in 1809. This may have
been a closing-up sale to raise money prior to his departure for England,
where he was to live for the rest of his life.
His two largest surviving pictures date from this period, 1810, when
he copied in London two drawings of the Alhambra and the Generalife
in Granada (Fig 4), making them into massive watercolours more than
2 x 3 feet each in size, and signed J.G. Oben. They now form part of
the Duke of Northumberland’s collection at Alnwick Castle. They
embody Strickland’s description of one of the characteristics of
his style, namely attempting in his drawings to obtain the effect of
oil pictures. Strickland adds that ‘his style is said to have been
characterised by extreme attention to detail and careful finish, but
wanting in boldness and freedom [words, in my view, belied by the quality
of some of his works reproduced here]; his skies were put in with much
feeling and effect, while his foregrounds were laboured and too minute
in detail’.
During the following years, he exhibited almost annually at the Royal
Academy in London,(25) and the titles of his Irish pictures suggest
that he may have occasionally returned to Ireland when he was in his
fifties: View of a waterfall in County Kilkenny (exhibited in 1812),
as well as a View of the Devil’s Glen, Co. Wicklow (1813), and
it is appropriate that the final picture of his that we know of was
another Irish subject entitled View of Glendalogh, the Valley of the
seven churches, Co. Wicklow on St Kevin’s Day exhibited in 1816.
Reviewing O’Brien’s output in these pages, it is remarkable
how much of his work is still in private collections which, of course,
is the main reason why his pictures are not better known. Of all the
watercolours that he is recorded as having exhibited both in Dublin
and London, the great majority I have not yet been able to locate—-the
Beau Parc/Fennor/Boyne series being the exception that proves the rule.
But by bringing to public notice here the catalogue of his achievements,
we may be able to identify more of the work of this remarkable landscape/antiquarian/figure
watercolourist that may still be lurking in family collections on either
side of the Irish Sea. He certainly merits being brought out of the
shadows, and into the limelight that he rightfully deserves.
