Walter Frederick Osborne

Dawson Gallery, Dublin
Private Collection
Acquired by the present owner circa 1980

Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, Walter Osborne Memorial Exhibition, 1903, no.37.

Jeanne Sheehy, Walter Frederick Osborne, Cork 1974, no. 560.

Original canvas. The surface is slightly dirty, the varnish has slightly discoloured and there are some scattered spots of staining otherwise in excellent original condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there are two small spots of old retouching in the bottom right corner and a small spot in the upper right corner otherwise there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a plaster gilt frame.
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During the last decade of his life, Osborne's favourite and most intimate subject was his niece, Violet Stockley. The Music Lesson depitcts her seated at the piano with an older campanion. She was the daughter of his sister Violet who had married W.F.P. Stockley and emigrated to Canada. Sadly, Violet Osborne died in childbirth and her daughter, also named Violet, was brought back to Ireland to be looked after by Osborne's parents. They were increasingly elderly and the artist quickly became responsible for the young girl. 

He included her in many of his most celebrated images from the period including The Goldfish Bowl (c.1900, Coll. Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Fig.1) in which she is wearing the same pinafore as the present work. Like The Goldfish Bowl, the present work captures the relaxed and informal atmosphere of the Osborne home and provides an interesting contrast to Osborne's more formal portrait commissions. By the time The Music Lesson was executed circa 1901, Osborne was undoubtedly the most famous portraitist in Ireland; indeed, George Russell wrote to Lady Gregory in 1901 'Dublin can't support more than one portrait painter – now it is Walter Osborne' (quoted in Sheehy, Walter Osborne, exh.cat., National Gallery of Ireland, 16 November – 31 December 1983, p.138). Unlike the formalilty of his commissioned portraits such as Dorothy and Irene Falkiner (sold in these rooms, 7^th May 2008, lot 133) where the sitters are dressed in their most luxurious finery and are placed staring directly out at the viewer, The Music Lesson creates a warmer and more peaceful ambience capturing the everyday detail of the domestic setting. The reflective and differing tonal properties of objects, such as the blue and white jug in the background to the right of the piano, allowed Osborne to show off his dexterous brushstrokes to maximum effect. This combination of genres; of still life, portraiture and portrait interior, became an important and characteristic feature of his best works from the last decade of his life and reached its zenith in works from the early years of the 20^th Century such as the present work and The Lustre Jug (c.1901, Coll. National Gallery of Ireland).

The fluid, confident and spontaneous handling of the The Music Lesson also exemplifies the bold style that Osborne developed during the 1890s after he returned to Dublin from England. In comparison to his earlier works from the early 1880s such as Apple Gathering Quimperlé (1883, Coll. National Gallery of Ireland) which demonstrated the clear influence of Bastien Lepage's square brush technique, the brushstrokes in the present work are freer and looser and show more of an affinity to the French Impressionists. Osborne had visited Paris with Walter Armstrong in 1895 and will have experienced their work at first hand. Indeed, it is not inconceivable to suggest that he even saw Renoir's Two Girls at the Piano (1892, Coll. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) which may have influenced the compositional arrangement of the present work.

We are grateful to Julian Campbell for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.