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Life
| b. London [var. Southampton]; independently wealthy, his mother being a member of a Quaker brewing family; O’Mahony relatives in Wicklow; gravelled to Muscow to study theatrical design, 1936; visited Peking, Bali, Yemen; persuaded by his tutor Edward Molyneaux to abandon stage-design for painting; one man show, London 1943; he was teaching in an English village with Art Council support, c.1944; |
| came to Ireland in 1949 and settled on West Coast; worked on Achill with Louis le Brocquy; moved to Italy and met Henry McIlhenny, the Tabasco ‘king’, who encouraged him to buy St Columbs, a rectory at Lough Gartan, in Churchill, Co. Donegal, close by McIlhenny’s estate Glenveagh Castle; purchased in 1953; travelled in Turkey with Freya Stark; |
| crossed to Tory island [Toraigh] and instigated the Tory Island School by encouraging the inhabitants to paint; to paint the surrounding landscape and seascapes; donated his house with its paintings to the Irish State as the Glebe Gallery, 1981; |
| painted prominent Irishmen incl. Erskine Childers and Garret Fitzgerald, his own classic topographical works incl. Tory Island from Tor More (1958); restrospective in RHA, 1998; honorary citizenship of Ireland conferred, 1999; d. 30 July. |
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Criticism
Lord Gray Gowrie, An Appreciation (Quartet hardback [?1995]); interview with Eileen Battersby, Irish Times, Thursday 17 Sept. 1998.
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Notes
New Writing: Derek Hill contrib. ‘Art in the Village’, to The Penguin New Writing, ed. John Lehmann, No. 26 (London: 1945), pp.145-50 [set in England].