Walter Frederick Osborne, the Great Talent from Ireland

Walter Frederick Osborne was born in Dublin at Castlewood Avenue at Rathmines on the 17th of June 1859. His father was of Dublin birth and also a popular artist and a Royal Hibernian academician who is now chiefly remembered as a painter of dogs and horses. The academy was an artist-based and artist-oriented institution in Ireland founded in Dublin in 1823. When the young Osborne was 17 he entered the art school of the Royal Hibernian Academy. A few months afterward he showed at the academy exhibition a little picture of the family fox terrier Zoe and modestly priced it at five guineas. He called himself in the catalogue Fred Osborne to avoid confusion between his name and his father's. It was not till 1885 at 26 years old that he appeared as Walter F Osborne. In the second year of his school he was represented at the academy by two landscapes and a study of a collie dog. He won a silver medal at the academy school in the same year and in 1880 was awarded the Albert Prize for a large landscape in oils. Thus his beginnings were being well established and landscape would play a key element in his natural gifts as we shall see. Pictured here is the large painting titled A Glade in the Phoenix Park. Painted when he was just 20 it represents a pool fringed with willows and ash trees in which a wading boy fishes with rod line and float. In 1882 he went to Amsterdam to study under Charles Verlat with whom he remained for two years. Verlat was a painter with a great love for sunlight and a great power of painting it, both of which he probably acquired during a long sojourn in the holy land. He strengthened and developed Osborne's own natural love of sunlight and many of his pupils' subsequent landscapes are remarkable for the ease and truthfulness with which they convey warm sunny effects. Osborne was elected during his absence abroad early in 1883 an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy and sent home to the Academy Exhibition. Following his election 11 paintings of Belgian scenery, some of them being little more than sketches. The year after he was represented by no fewer than 15 landscapes which included Breton as well as Belgian views. In 1885 he sent landscapes from Surrey and Warwickshire. In 1886 he was elected a full member of the Hibernian Academy, presumably on the merits of his landscapes alone. About this time he established a custom of spending his summers as a boarder in secluded English farmhouses, particularly in those of Surrey, Sussex, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Warwickshire and Norfolk. The fruits of these holidays mingled with pictures of scenes in the Dublin streets were shown every spring in the Hibernian Academy exhibitions and brought him considerable reputation but little material success. His landscapes almost invariably contained figures which were beautifully drawn and carefully placed. Sometimes he even made the landscapes subservient to the figures, as in one or two of his admirable pictures of the benches in Stevens Green, a picture that displays Osborne's innate skill as a plein air painter, more rarely still and generally in his earliest period he painted interiors in which figures were of prime importance. A noticeable example of this phase is the small portraits where the setting was at least as carefully treated as the sitter. One of the best of these is that of Captain Stephen Gwynn, representing, in the captain's own words, a very young man smoking a pipe while he reads, seen up against a studio table littered with brushes and palettes and a wall nailed over with sketches. Osborne travelled extensively to Antwerp, France and Spain to study and became influenced by the impactful art movements dominating Europe, such as naturalism and impressionism. He was fascinated by the technical effects of painting light and colour in the open air, which he was well suited for, as mentioned earlier. He preferred depicting scenes of everyday life reflected by such artists as Bastien Lepage and Dagnon Bouveret with their cool all-pervading tones. It was a fresh naturalistic style and approach sweeping the times, but we can also see he was not opposed to looking into the themed historical ideas for further inspiration demonstrated in his sketchbooks. As many an artist can relate, given the creative impulse to try new things as one sits in front of a blank canvas ready for that first stroke. Osborne spent much of his time in Dublin with his parents during the winter months and in the summer travelled to rural England and frequent English museums and galleries to gather inspiration and make important contacts, leading him to his later in life dedication to portrait work for income. Osborne does not seem to have thought seriously about portraiture, in the usual sense of the word, until the 1890s were well begun. The first important portrait in oils which he exhibited was one of Dr. Anthony Corley. It was shown at the Royal Hibernian Academy exhibition in the year 1889, but here we have a sudden mystery. What happened to Dr. Corley's portrait? Well, we have the following account from the college webpage they begin. Let us now turn our attention to the mystery of the portrait. It is the tradition in the RCSI, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, for the president to have their portrait painted and then hung within the college once their term of office is finished. Dr. Corley commissioned a portrait of himself by the well-known artist William Osborne in 1889. Dr. Corley died in 1890 and subsequently the portrait was never presented to the college. An email from a distant relation of Dr. Corley's inquiring about the portrait got us wondering if the family doesn't have the portrait and the college doesn't have the portrait. Where in the world is the Osborne portrait of Dr. Anthony Haggerty Corley hanging today? The mystery remains. In 1890 Osborne showed no portrait, but in the following year a competent but rather dull portrait of Edward Dowden shown here, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, created the trend that kept him busily occupied until his premature death. Wasting his talent in immortalizing the people of reputation, rank, or fashion in Dublin, as reported by Osborne's biographer, he painted over a hundred of them in little more than ten years. For a while his landscape painting continued to flourish beside his essays in portraiture. In 1895 he went on a tour in Spain with Sir Walter Armstrong, then director of the Irish National Gallery, and in the year following on a tour to Holland with the same companion. Landscapes painted in both these countries were duly exhibited in the Hibernian Academy. They were almost the last of their kind. In 1898 four of his total of five exhibits were portraits. From thenceforth his landscape work was relegated to the second place in his endeavors. He still painted landscapes in his holidays and still occasionally sent one or two to the exhibitions. But he felt, as the earlier master of both landscape and portraiture, Thomas Gainsborough must have felt when he showed his landscapes to Lord Lansdowne of his time saying, People won't buy them, you know. I'm a landscape painter, and yet they come to me for portraits. Osborne had more reason to regret the public's predilections, for, unlike Gainsborough, he was far greater in his landscapes than in his portraits. He knew this himself and deplored the disloyalty to his art into which he was led by a most admirable loyalty to his family. Yet when seven years had passed without his being able to sell a single important landscape, he wrenched himself from what he truly loved and turned unflinchingly to what he thought was duty. Like many good painters, Osborne possessed a shrewd business sense and took every legitimate opportunity of increasing his reputation, showing his wares wherever and whenever he could. As a result, notwithstanding the moderate prices he asked for them and the still more moderate prices he generally received, he left a fortune of close to $4,000, an equivalent to $120,000 today. In 1881, he began to exhibit in England, sending a picture to the Walker Art Gallery of Liverpool, which institution he continued to favour with fair regularity, and his work found plenty of admirers and an occasional purchaser in Lancashire, though the Liverpool Art Corporation never thought fit to add an example of it to their permanent collection. He first sent pictures to London, to the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours, which became known as the Society of Oil Painters. In 1886, he began his series of contributions to the Royal Academy exhibitions, which continued annually. The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists attracted his notice in 1888 and he exhibited with them on eight occasions during the next decade. At the Paris International Exhibition of 1900, his portrait of Mrs. Noel Guinness and her daughter was declared worthy of a bronze medal, and its frame was labelled by the authorities to that effect. But at the close of the exhibition, Osborne was invited to forward the cost of the medal he had won, and as he very properly refused to do so, he never received his prize. Another honour, one rarely conferred on an Irish artist, was offered to him in the same year when Lord Cadogan, the Viceroy, wished to make him a knight in recognition of his merits as a painter, which he modestly declined the dignity. Osborne's larger pictures were all on canvas. The smaller ones and sketches are often found painted directly on unprimed white wood panels. Watercolours did not appeal to him as much as oils. He has not left many watercolour drawings, and apparently produced very few, until comparatively late in life. Many most interesting scraps of information, as to Osborne's tastes and temperament, can be gleaned from the collection of his catalogues, which his mother presented to the National Library of Ireland soon after his death. Several of them are elaborately annotated and contain excellent sketches, a few of which are originals. On the 24th of April, 1903, Osborne died suddenly of double pneumonia, in the house where he was born, and where all his life was spent. He was only 43 years of age when he died and was unmarried. His father had passed away two years before, but his mother lived for seven years longer. As he had always shown a generous temperament, a sense of fun, and a spirit of sportsmanship, he left a wide circle of personal friends, to whom his charming personality had endeared him. These were by no means all artists or art lovers, for he had no inveterate taste for such company. Osborne worked in most media. He painted with equal facility in both oils and watercolour. He also did many fine drawings in pastel, and at least two etchings. It's been stated, there is no Irish painter who comes near rivalling his versatility, either in range of subject or in variety of technique. His work shows the most scholarly appreciation of the possibilities and limitations of each method. His landscapes in oil are at times perhaps too fluidly painted, and in some cases they show a tendency to crack. They never show a trace of underpainting, nor of ill-considered arrangement. His manner of laying paint became broader and freer, with each succeeding year less careful, but more skilful. Finally, we hope you enjoyed this look at the brief life of an extraordinary painter, whose work inspires us even today. His natural gifts were on display from the beginning. Thank you to our subscribers, and if you would please leave a like, as it helps the channel a great deal, and we will be bringing many more well-deserved and highly skilled artists in the future. So for now, thank you.