Daniel O'Neill (1920 - 1974) Portrait of Young Woman Oil on board, 45 x 35cm (17¾ x 13¾) Signed The epithet Romantic is often applied to the work of Daniel O’Neill, though that can be misleading. His paintings are indeed romantic, but not in the strict art historical sense of Romanticism and the Romantic movement. Rather they are romantic in the sense that Puccini’s La Bohème is romantic, evoking the bohemian life of artists in the Latin Quarter in Paris, a world of intense emotion and passionate creativity. O’Neill visited and loved this world in 1948, when he stayed in Montmartre, brilliantly capturing the atmosphere in one of his best known paintings, Place du Tertre (now in the Ulster Museum). But imaginatively, artistically, he always seemed to inhabit it. Born in Belfast, the son of an electrician, he followed his father into the trade, working for the corporation’s transport department and the shipyards. But even in his early teens he was drawn to art, studying books in the library and attending night classes at technical college. At work he opted for night shifts, painting during daylight. He was taken up by the fine painter and muralist Sidney Smith and befriended Gerard Dillon, exhibiting with him in Dublin in 1943. The great dealer Victor Waddington put him on contract two years later, establishing him as an artist. He had a natural instinct for simplified, stylised imagery, innate compositional ability, and an eye for drama (little wonder he was commissioned by the Abbey to design the set for a production of Synge’s Playboy). Dreamy melancholy is one of the defining moods of his work, a term that perfectly suits this outstanding, idealised study of a young woman. She looks not back at the viewer but is lost in her own thoughts. The agitated background unmistakably suggests a tempestuous inner life. Quite early on, Cecil ffrench Salkeld noted O’Neill’s exceptional skill at juggling contrasting paint textures in a single composition, marrying the vigorous impasto of brush and palette knife with soft, silky glazes. That skill is used to great effect here in the caressing dialogue between fabric and flesh, figure and ground. In addition, O’Neill illuminates his subject with the expertise of a Hollywood lighting cameraperson. Aidan Dunne, August 2022