Walter Frederick Osborne, R.H.A.

During his time in England, alongside realistic genre scenes with children on canvas, such as A Tale of the Sea (lot 116), Osborne also painted small 'plein air' landscapes on panel. By the late 1880s, his style was becoming more loose and impressionistic.

In the present such painting, Osborne observes a village street on a summer's day. The figures and buildings are placed along the centre of the composition. The red brick houses with terracotta tiled roofs complement the rich hues of the artist's palette. Osborne takes a low viewpoint, so that the foreground is empty, but a woman in red begins to cross the village street on the left. Other figures, and perhaps a grazing cow, are visible in the middle distance.

These were ideas that Osborne was later to develop in his 'plein air' studies painted in Ireland in the 1890s. For example, a similar low viewpoint is to be found in the small, impressionistic studies that Osborne made at Rush, Co. Dublin in the late 1890s, and in the small, jewel like painting A horse fair, Galway, 1893, he was also to evoke the sense that village life was taking place in the background, just over the horizon; and the fleeting, shawled figure of a woman was similarly shown on the left.

In the present picture, Osborne skillfully paints with a 'wet on-wet' technique. He employs a swift 'square-brush' style in the forms of the woman and the houses, allowing the edges of the brush marks to blur into the pale, slightly over-cast style. The greenery of the trees is suggested in the bold, sketchy manner of his friend and compatriot Nathanial Hone. Osborne makes use of a varied palette characteristic of such English paintings: pinks, maroons, greens, roses and ochres, to give an impression of sweetness and warmth. Small flourishes and curls of paint in the foreground: red, brown and yellow are scattered on the ground like fallen leaves.

The picture was probably painted circa 1890 and it is possible that it is the picture entitled In a Berkshire Village, exhibited at the Dublin Art Club in 1891.

Julian Campbell