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Walter Frederick Osborne , Irish, 1859-1903

Title

Portrait of J.B.S. MacIlwaine (1857-1945), Artist and Inventor

Date1892

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions

61 x 51 cm

Signedlower right: Walter Osborne

Credit LinePurchased, 1927

Object numberNGI.882

InscriptionTo my friend J.B.S. MacIlwaine 1890
Exhibition HistoryDublin Arts Club, Dublin, 1893

Centenary Exhibition, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, October - December 1964

Aspects of Irish Art, a Loan Exhibition; Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 27 January - 3 March 1974; Toledo Museum of Arts, Toledo, Ohio, 17 March - 14 April 1974; St Louis Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri, 3 May - 9 June 1974

Irish Art from Nathaniel Hone to Nano Reid – the Drogheda Municipal Art Collection in Context, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, 4 October 2006 – 18 February 2007

Label TextOsborne painted two portraits of his lifelong friend MacIlwaine, one when they were fellow students at the RHA schools, and this much later picture. The setting is almost certainly the garden of MacIlwaine’s home in Foxrock, Co. Dublin, which Osborne visited frequently. Fresh, controlled and tonal, the picture is an exemplar of pleinairism, the style associated with working out of doors that Osborne had first learnt as a student in Belgium and mastered in provincial France and England. This is one of the first paintings he produced after his return to Ireland in 1892.