Walter Frederick Osborne

Pyms Gallery, London;
Sotheby's, London, 19 November 2013, lot 84;
Private Collection

Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 1889, no.220;
London, Pyms Gallery, The Irish Revival, 1982, no.2;
Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, Walter Osborne, 1983, no.27, with tour to Ulster Museum, Belfast

Jeanne Sheehy, Walter Osborne, Ballycotton, 1974, no.220

The panel appears sound and the work in good overall condition, ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals a few small flecks of retouching in the sky and also to the trousers of the boy. Held in a gilt composite frame.
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In a quiet country lane, villagers pause to converse as the day draws to a close, the last of the light falling across the road and touching upon the thatched roofs. This gentle, rural scene depicts the village of Uffington in Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire), and is characteristic of Osborne’s oeuvre. Osborne spent much of the 1880s in rural English villages, usually in the company of other artists, taking lodgings in guesthouses when he found a suitable subject. He stayed in Uffington in the autumn of 1888 with an English artist and close friend, William Teulon Blandford Fletcher.

Loiterers displays Osborne’s plein air technique, which he developed in his student days at the Academie in Antwerp from 1881-83, and later that year in Brittany until 1884. During this time, many English artists were also working there, such as George Clausen, Stanhope Forbes and Henry Herbert La Thangue and it is likely Osborne came in to contact with them. Together, these artists rejected academic tradition and embraced plein air painting, rural subject matter and a ‘square brush’ technique, inspired by the French naturalist, Jules Bastien-Lepage.  We see these principles applied in Loiterers, although Osborne maintained his own personal ideals: as an excellent draughtsman he did not submit fully to broad brushwork; he responded to contrasts of light – against the philosophy of working in even, grey tones, and he did not laden his subjects with strong, social overtones. He also did not feel the desire to attach himself to a particular place, like many of his contemporaries, such as the village of Lorraine for Bastien-Lepage or the Cornish coast for the Newlyners.

During Osborne's time away from Dublin, he maintained active links with its artistic community, being elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1883 and a full member in 1886. He was a founding member of the Dublin Art Club (with parallels to the New English Art Club), and on his return to Dublin in the early 1890s was an influential teacher at the Academy Schools. William Leech remarked that Osborne taught him, ‘everything I need to know’ (quoted in A. Denson, John Hughes, Kendal, 1969, p.68). Osborne indeed played a significant role in the introduction to Dublin of European influences, embodied in such works as the present, and deservedly secured a reputation as one of the most important Irish artists of his generation.