Connections
Keating & Power
Two artists, one national vision
Seán Keating (1889–1977) and Albert G. Power (1881–1945) were two of the most significant Irish artists of the revolutionary period — one a painter, one a sculptor, both formed at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, both committed nationalists, and both deeply engaged in the project of giving the new Irish state a visual identity.
Seán Keating
Born John Keating in County Limerick on 28 September 1889, Keating studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art on a scholarship arranged by William Orpen, and later taught painting there. He is best known for his images of the Irish War of Independence — particularly Men of the South (1921–22) — and his portraits of Aran Islands people as rugged heroic figures. He was elected president of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1949 and died in Dublin on 21 December 1977.
The DMSA Circle
Power and Keating were part of an extraordinary cohort at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in the early 1900s. Their contemporaries included Kathleen Fox, Willie Pearse (brother of Pádraic Pearse), Grace Gifford, and Countess Markievicz and her husband Casimir. Kathleen Fox later recalled that Power, Willie Pearse, and Grace Gifford would discuss politics privately while she listened — and that these three were responsible for her own growing enthusiasm for the nationalist cause.
This was the world Keating and Power both inhabited — a school in which art and politics were inseparable, and in which the question of what Irish art should look like was also a question about what Ireland itself should be.
Shared Vision
Both held the conviction that Irish artists should use native materials and subjects. Power wrote publicly about his use of Durrow limestone for the Ó Conaire memorial (1935). Keating shared this sensibility — his Aran Islands portraits elevated ordinary islanders as heroic subjects, the same democratic instinct Power brought to his seated, informal Ó Conaire placed on a dry-stone Connemara wall rather than an imposing plinth.
Kathleen Fox's painting Science and Power (1915), held at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, shows Power at work in his studio — one of the most important visual records of the sculptor in his element.
The Academic Realist Tradition
Keating and Power were, in the estimation of later critics, representatives of the same academic realist tradition in Irish art — one that was increasingly overshadowed in art historical writing by the modernist tendency represented by artists like Mainie Jellett. As the art critic Fintan Cullen observed, those who pursued the modernist line were almost inevitably hailed as innovative while academic realists like Keating were often sidelined in the standard accounts.
This sidelining affected Power's sculptural legacy in a similar way. The generation of sculptors who came after him — Séamus Murphy, Laurence Campbell, Oisín Kelly, Melanie le Brocquy, Peter Grant — moved toward abstraction and experimentation. Power, who died in 1945, was seen as the end of a line rather than the beginning of one. That judgement has softened considerably with time.
Seán Keating, Tipperary Hurler, 1928
Painting · Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, no. 1070
© estate of Seán Keating/IVARO, Dublin 2018
One of Keating's major figure studies, showing the same commitment to representing
ordinary Irish people as heroic subjects that Power brought to the Ó Conaire memorial.
A Family Note
The connection between the Keating and Power families extends beyond the professional. Mark Freer, the great-grandson of Albert Power, has a grandmother who was a Keating — a family connection that may one day prove to illuminate a more personal link between these two great figures of Irish nationalist art. Research is ongoing.