Interviewed in December 1969 about the type of face he best liked, the artist Sean Keating, who had only recently celebrated his 80th birthday, said: "First and foremost, it has to be a well-boned head with clear forms, not blurred. An Irish head comes, in my opinion, very close to the average of what I like to see.
Wide well-formed cheekbones, a good physiognomy, as an anatomist would call it, well-shaped square chin, narrow, straight mouth, well-drawn brows, the eye-sockets well defined, small neat ears, close to the head; that kind of thing".
Many of these characteristics are to be seen in a drawing of a woman's head by Keating which is about to be offered for sale. The artist, who died eight years later in December 1977, was widely considered the finest draughtsman of his generation and, as the then-director of the National Gallery of Ireland, James White, said at the time, the natural heir of William Orpen, whose favourite pupil he had been (and who occasionally used him as a model).
Indeed, the older artist invited Keating to assist him in his London studio in 1915 but after a year the student left his master and returned home, travelling to work on the Aran Islands. "Here was the Ireland that I could paint," he later explained. "When I went to Aran . . . I knew then that I had landed where I wanted to be."
Keating, more than any other artist of the 20th century, defined the popular image of the west of Ireland and, especially, her people. For him, the inhabitants of the Aran Islands and of Connemara were imbued with nobility, no matter how meagre their material circumstances.
A profile of the artist late in his life suggested that Keating "has immortalised the faces of the men of the West of Ireland in the same manner that the great Synge did for the dialect." Speaking after the artist's death, James White said, "His feeling for fine incisive line was in the tradition of the great masters of old", a point echoed by Maurice MacGonigal when he observed that Keating had been "a magnificent draughtsman and as a painter he believed that he was interpreting the mind of the Irish people, especially of the western seaboard."
In many respects, Keating in both his art and outlook bore similarities with Augustus John, a friend of Orpen's and, again, an intuitively brilliant draughtsman. And both men moved from being radicals in their youth to conservatism in old age; in 1973, at the age of 84 and described as "an angry old man", Keating denounced art of the time, saying, "I consider it to be madness and stupidity for young people to go astray before they even learned to draw".
The Irish artist's own natural brio is more apparent in his drawings than in his paintings, which can sometimes seem excessively laboured in execution and symbolism.
With a pencil, however, instinct took precedence over calculation and the results are invariably fresh and dynamic. This is certainly true of the drawing of a woman's head on offer next Monday in Dublin at 7 p.m. With an estimate of £1,500£2,000, it is included in a sale of paintings and antique furniture being conducted by Cork-based Morgan O'Driscoll at Sach's Hotel in Donnybrook.
