In the domain of Irish art history, the work of painter Frank O'Meara looks like a blue chip investment. He wasn't prolific by any means, he died comparatively young and his paintings are infused with a mood of romantic melancholy. Even so, to bid almost half a million pounds sterling for one of his pictures, Reverie, as an art dealer did at Christie's last week, when his work had previously fetched only a fraction of that amount, seems like a bit of a gamble. By contrast, the record-breaking price of close to one-and-a-quarter million pounds sterling for an outstanding Jack B. Yeats, The Wild Ones, at Sotheby's, seemed entirely warranted, even predictable, because prices for his work have been steadily climbing from year to year with hardly a hiccup.
"There are very few O'Mearas around," Brian Coyle of Adams Auctioneers explains. "I think I've sold two in all the years I've been in business. So you can't really judge the market on that. Whereas I can remember saying around 1990 that before the end of the century a Yeats will go for over a million." Part of O'Meara's appeal is that he is one of the select group of artists who painted overtly attractive pictures and were included in The Irish Impressionists, the National Gallery of Ireland's ground-breaking exhibition back in 1984. The curator of that show, art historian Dr Julian Campbell, had extensively researched the painters who, like O'Meara, travelled to France and Belgium to study and work during a period that extended from the 1850s to the outbreak of the first World War. In effect, Campbell shone a spotlight on to generations of "missing" Irish artists.
They were missing in the sense that the focus of much of their work - and in some cases all or most of their working lives - was in France. In fact, when you look at their paintings, including O'Meara's, you quickly recognise the same, recurrent backgrounds. In particular the woodland around the village of Grez-sur-Loing must be one of the most extensively painted landscapes ever. Aspects of it, including the bridge over the river Loing, crop up again and again - to the point of tedium. A fine, scrupulous art historian, Campbell has always been at pains to explain that there is one important point about the Irish Impressionist tag: the Irish painters were not Impressionists.
It is true that the Impressionist revolution was happening while many of them, including O'Meara, were working away in France, but they remained on the whole oblivious to it. Their interest lay with the more conservative, realist plein-air painters. There is a school of thought which, with some justification, holds the view that the extraordinary level of influence exercised by plein airists like Jules Bastien-Lepage was positively detrimental to the development of Irish art.
As every curator and auctioneer knows well, the word Impressionist works a kind of magic in the public imagination and, once applied, the label has tended to stick. O'Meara could never be mistaken for an Impressionist, though. His subdued, melancholy paintings almost invariably feature isolated female figures lingering in moody, autumnal landscapes, gloomily prefiguring his own death, from malaria, at home in his native Carlow in October 1988. His best known, and perhaps his best picture is Towards Night and Winter in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, which also has four more of his works. He was widely liked and respected among his peers, including the many Scottish and Scandinavian painters in France, and a lot of his work was bought by fellow professionals. Campbell, who also curated an exhibition devoted to the work of O'Meara and his contemporaries, has pointed out that the fin de siecle Celtic twilight mood of his paintings anticipated, though did not directly influence, Yeats's first collection of poems The Wanderings of Oisin, published just a year after the painter's death.
Nathaniel Hone, Walter Osborne, Sir John Lavery, Roderic O'Conor and William Leech are among the best known Irish painters to have significant French connections. Of them, O'Conor is significant in that he was interested in and informed about the latest developments. In his own work he took on board Post-Impressionism. In fact you could say he became an honorary French painter, settling there and living as a virtual recluse.
His work, and that of the other artists mentioned, has performed well on the market. It is true that the saga of Irish art at auction is long and labyrinthine. But it is fair to say that, allowing for the boom-and-bust cycle of the local and international art market, which is dictated by wider economic circumstances, the underlying trend is that prices paid for Irish art have climbed consistently, with occasional headline-grabbing anomalies like the O'Meara or, periodically, the latest record for a Yeats or a Lavery. There are several good reasons for this, including the fact that Irish art was undervalued to begin with. Then, a great deal of work, on the part of both scholars like Anne Crookshank, the Knight of Glin, Julian Campbell and Bruce Arnold, and auctioneers like Brian Coyle of Adams and, latterly, the big firms of Christie's and Sotheby's, went into building a profile for an aspect of art that was, until relatively recently, quite obscure.
While Anne Crookshank labours to bring the story of Irish art into the light as a dedicated art historian, obviously the interest of the big auction houses is not exactly altruistic (it should be mentioned that the Knight of Glin wears two hats, as both an historian and Christie's agent in Ireland). Their concerted advance into the Irish market is driven by a simple need for new product. All of which would count for nothing if people didn't have the confidence to spend money on art.
But, even when they buy in London, Irish buyers look for Irish pictures, Brian Coyle believes. "They are conservative. They're generally nervous about buying anything other than Irish art. they feel they know where they are with it." Sure enough, the underbidder for the Yeats and the purchaser of the O'Meara are both said to be Irish businessmen. The good thing about such patriotism is that we're unlikely to see our artistic heritage disappear abroad, even if a great deal of it is already there in spirit - in Grez-surLoing and its environs.
