The Photograph Behind the Painting: Walter Osborne's Dublin
Walter Osborne died in 1903 at just 44, but he left behind something most painters of his generation did not: his own reference photographs. The National Gallery of Ireland holds a collection of over a hundred photographs that Osborne gathered and, in some cases, took himself, of the streets, labourers, and fishing families he painted. A number of these images sat behind the scenes for decades. Now they are public, through a free digital archive called Source, and one photograph in particular shows exactly how Osborne worked.
What Source Is
Source is the National Gallery of Ireland's online archive of catalogued and digitised material from its Irish art collections: letters, sketchbooks, diaries, and photographs belonging to artists such as Walter Osborne, William Orpen, and Jack B. Yeats. It holds tens of thousands of catalogue records and thousands of digital images, most of them available to view for free, with new material added as cataloguing continues.
The Photograph Behind the Painting
Among the Osborne material is a photograph of Saint Patrick's Close in Dublin, showing the cathedral tower rising over a row of houses. Osborne used that photograph directly when painting Near Saint Patrick's Close, An Old Dublin Street. He did not copy it exactly. He exaggerated the height of the cathedral's tower and spire to give it more presence in the composition, and he added children into the street scene who are not in the photograph at all, turning a straightforward record of a place into a scene with its own quiet narrative. Seeing the photograph and the painting together, as Source allows, is a rare chance to watch a nineteenth-century Irish painter's process in real time.
Watch: Walter Osborne's Dublin
This short film from the National Gallery of Ireland introduces Source and looks at the Osborne photographic collection in more detail.
Osborne's Ireland, In Print
We don't carry Near Saint Patrick's Close itself, but Osborne's eye for Dublin streets and rural life runs through several pieces in our collection, from the cathedral sketches to the market scenes of Connemara and Galway.
See the full range of Walter Osborne prints and canvases in our Walter Osborne collection. To explore the photographs and letters behind his work yourself, Source is free to browse at sourcenationalgallery.ie.