A hundred years ago today George Russell had his first exhibition of paintings. After years of neglect, interest in his work has been revived, writes Diana Beale.

'My exhibition has just opened and my heart is full of woe because I have sold over half of them the first day." Perhaps not many artists would say such a thing of their first public exhibition, but that's what George William Russell (or AE as he is better known) said 100 years ago this week to his friend and patron, John Quinn, the New York attorney and collector of art.

He went on to boast gently, "I think I have sold thirty-seven altogether and I believe I have beaten the record in Dublin for any show of the kind. I will hardly have a picture on my walls and I had grown fond of them." Not bad for a man who did not consider himself to be a professional artist and who painted for pleasure rather than gain.

From August 23rd to September 3rd, 1904, together with Constance Gore-Booth and her Polish husband, Count Casimir Dunin Markievicz, AE showed 63 out of the 220 paintings in an exhibition in Dublin entitled Pictures of Two Countries.

Any study of AE's painting is complicated by his prolificacy. He was often repetitive - he painted similar scenes again and again, used the same title for more than one picture and rarely dated his work. Original titles of paintings have been lost or changed, or were never given in the first place. So it is incredibly fortunate that for this first exhibition there is a treasury of information which gives a fascinating insight into the sort of pictures AE was painting around this time and their public appeal.

Much of AE's background is well known. Born in Lurgan, Co Down in 1867, he moved to Dublin with his parents 11 years later, where he was to remain until three years before his death in 1935. His breadth of knowledge, skill, interest and talent are legendary and much has been written about him as a poet, writer, editor, economic thinker, theosophist and mystic.

Little has been written, however, about his painting and his place in the pantheon of Irish artists. Yet of all the Irish artists of the period, only two stayed and painted almost exclusively in Ireland - AE and Jack B. Yeats.

In 1904, AE was 37. He had been married to Violet North, a fellow theosophist, for six years. He had been working for Horace Plunkett's Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS) for approximately seven years. He had not yet become editor of the Irish Homestead, the weekly periodical of the IAOS - this would happen the following year - but he was a regular contributor to that journal.

Because of humility or perhaps a lack of confidence, or both, AE needed some persuading to join the Markieviczes for their 1904 exhibition.

At that point, few of his paintings had reached the public eye. He had, however, earlier begun to prepare for an exhibition of mystical paintings in 1902 when he declared in a letter to Stephen Gwynn about pictures of the sidhe, "I intend to have an exhibition of them as the Invisible Inhabitants of Ireland, sometime during the autumn". This show never took place, it seems, but some of these pictures may have been included in the 1904 exhibition. Titles listed in the 1904 catalogue suggest paintings of a mystical or mythological nature, and they constitute over one third of AE's exhibits. These titles include The Winged Horse, Spirit of the Pool and The Vision of Angus, to name a few.

But there were more than just the mystical paintings. According to the Irish Homestead reviewer, Iberian, AE's works divided themselves "externally into two groups - landscapes and pictures of faery", and in some "both elements appear, but the dividing line is always between the vision of the outward eye and the vision of the inner sense". Landscapes painted in Dunfanaghy, Co Donegal, and in Co Sligo can be clearly identified by their titles, as can those painted at Coole Park, Co Galway and Lissadell, Co Sligo. But titles alone cannot give us a sense of what it must have been like to walk into the Leinster Lecture Hall during that week in August 1904.

However, one man not only did just that, but also devoted two pages in his diary to a description of the impact of AE's paintings. Joseph Holloway, a well-known chronicler of Dublin literary events around that time, gives a lyrical account of the paintings and the feelings they evoked.

"The strange, misty, weird, almost uncanny something about all George W. Russell's work fascinated me in an unaccountable way ... although I felt inclined to scoff at them on first entering the room. If ever the Celtic spirit of dreaminess and longing for something that is neither of land or sea was translated onto canvas here that longing and dreaminess surely was.

"The strange figures that peopled many of his canvases seemed creatures of the mists out of which they emerged with almost mysterious indefiniteness and beauty of another world - the land of imagination. But who could explain the beyond-the-world feelings and sense of restfulness that held the imagination as they gazed on those strange, mystic visions of beauty, conjured up by the poetic mind of a dreamer of the twilight kingdom inhabited by the children of the mist - the gossamer beings of the raths of Ireland."

Iberian put it another way: "It is, perhaps, in his treatment of atmospheres that Mr Russell's most charming and satisfying effects are produced, and the sense of brooding tranquility and a living peace which is over his hillsides and in his sketches of bog and plain mark an exquisite sensibility to the moods of nature."

Iberian also tells us something about how AE handled paint and composition. He describes AE's treatment of colour as "particularly wonderful", the tones of his blues and yellows as "particularly striking", and wrote that his "use, too, of a solitary figure, or of a few figures, wrapped about with silence and the spaces of the air and the hills, is a revelation of the nearness of natural men to the heart of Nature itself. Even manual drudgery seems half-sacramental."

Clearing Stones, which subsequently became The Stone Carriers, is one such picture and was purchased at the Pictures of Two Countries exhibition by Sir Hugh Lane and exhibited again two months later at the Royal Hibernian Academy. A review in the Irish Homestead of that exhibition referred to this picture as the "Stone Gatherers", and the unnamed reviewer remarked how "one feels intensely the rough-hewn majesty of the figures." In the reviewer's opinion, it had been the best of AE's pictures in the exhibition two months earlier.

AE reserved a number of paintings for his New York patron, John Quinn, who continued to purchase AE's paintings for many years. In a memorial catalogue of Quinn's collection issued in 1926, no fewer than 62 paintings by AE were listed.

AE continued to exhibit on an annual basis with the Markieviczes and others in Dublin up to and including 1915.

After that, he held no exhibitions in Ireland apart from informal viewings for friends. Exhibitions were held in the United States up until the early 1930s, however. Public interest in his work as an artist dwindled after his death, to such an extent that in the 1950s, it has been said, a painting of his could not be sold even when a coal scuttle was added to the lot.

In more recent times, interest in his paintings has revived and nowadays there is competition for his better paintings when they come up for auction.

Most (if not all) of the major public art galleries in Ireland hold pictures by AE, notably the Armagh County Museum, the Model Art and Niland Gallery in Sligo, the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery and the National Gallery in Dublin. The first three of these each hold at least one of the pictures exhibited in 1904.

Apart from those in Armagh and in Sligo, most of AE's pictures in public collections reside unexhibited, languishing in the vaults or storage centres. Isn't it about time some of them were brought back to public view?

When, for example, will we see exhibited the murals from the walls of AE's office at the Plunkett House that were saved from destruction by the National Gallery of Ireland?

AE's first public exhibition a century ago delighted the public. It is not inconceivable that, given a chance, the same could happen today. Some of AE's finest paintings are in private ownership. It would be a fine thing to see a loan exhibition of some of these paintings, alongside others rarely seen in public collections. Now is the time for AE's paintings and his place in Irish art to be reassessed and re-established.

Acknowledgements: The New York Public Library (John Quinn Memorial Collection) for permission to quote from AE's letter to John Quinn. The trustees of the National Library of Ireland for permission for the Joseph Holloway quotation.

Diana Beale is researching a book on AE, the artist, and is compiling a catalogue of his paintings. Anyone with paintings or information which might assist her research can contact her confidentially at beale@which.net or write c/o Dyffryn Ganol, Crickhowell, Powys, Wales