Walter Frederick Osborne R.H.A, R.O.I (1859-1903) Feeding the Chickens at Bonhams. (Click on image to enlarge). UPDATE: IT WAS UNSOLD.
A masterwork by Walter Osborne to be offered at Bonhams in London next July will be on display at the official opening the company’s new offices in Dublin on February 24. Feeding the chickens (1884-85) is estimated to fetch £500,000-700,000. Unseen on the open market since 1913 and from a private collection in Ireland it will be sold as part of the 19th Century Paintings sale on July 11.
Bonhams Molesworth St. offices.
Walter Frederick Osborne R.H.A, R.O.I (1859-1903) is regarded as the most important Irish artist of his generation. Feeding the chickens features in a letter to his father while the artist was working at North Littleton, near Stratford on Avon in Warwickshire, in which he writes that he is: “pretty far advanced on a kit-cat of a girl feeding fowl in a sort of farmyard….” He studied at the Antwerp Academy in 1881 and 1882, and worked in Brittany the following year before returning to Ireland to pursue a career as an artist. It was in France that he developed his naturalistic style of Impressionist landscape painting for which he was to make such a name for himself. From the mid 1880’s to 1890 Osborne visited small towns, villages and harbours in England and painted local people tending livestock, feeding chickens and ploughing fields.
Bonhams has taken and refurbished new space in a Georgian townhouse at 31 Molesworth St., Dublin. The building, which retains many original features, provides a large ground floor office, a private meeting room for valuations, and first floor exhibition rooms.
UPDATE: THE PAINTING FAILED TO REACH ITS RESERVE AND WAS UNSOLD.
(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for January 12, 2012)