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Life
44, St Joseph’s Terrace, SCR (Dublin); grew up at 126, St Stephen’s Green; son of John O’Sullivan, a carpenter and joiner; ed. Synge St. CBS and Metropolitan School of Art; worked with Spencer Pryse and Zarraga at Central School of Art, London, on schol.; also Acadème Julien, Paris; HRHA at 21; MRHA 1931; portraits include De Valera, Hyde, Yeats, and Joyce; Stations of the Cross, Portarlington, and mural for Medical Missionaries, Drogheda; commem. postage stamps of Sir Wm. Rowan Hamilton, Ignatius Rice, and Douglas Hyde; also landscapes; d. 4 April, Nenagh; his port. of Yeats hangs in the foyer of the Abbey Th., Dublin; numerous chalk ports. of Irish writers adorn the modern stairwell of the National Gallery (old wing); O’Sullivan was over six feet, a good boxer, a fencer, a squash player and a keen sailor. DIB
| Eimer O’Connor: ‘Seán O’Sullivan was born in 44 St Joseph’s Terrace, South Circular Road, and later raised in 126 St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, where his father, John, ran a business as a carpenter and joiner. He was educated with the Christian Brothers’ at Synge Street. Measuring over six feet, he was a good boxer, a fencer, a squash player and an enthusiastic sailor. He was also a keen reader and was fluent in both Irish and French. O’Sullivan entered the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1926 where one of his teachers was Seán Keating. His student days were intermittent but while at the school O’Sullivan came to the attention of the then Headmaster, George Atkinson, who arranged for him to undertake a three month training course in lithography at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London under Archibold Standish Hartrick. While in London, O’Sullivan met and later married a young Anglo-Dutch art student, Rene Mouw, and the pair spent their early married years studying in Paris. He then worked as a lithographer with Frank Brangwyn having returned to London in the late 1920s. The couple returned to Dublin in the early 1930s and in 1936 O’Sullivan took a studio at Molesworth Street where he remained until he moved to 6 St Stephen’s Green in 1939. He remained in that studio until his death in 1964. Working in the centre of Dublin meant that O’Sullivan was well-connected in the social scene at the time. He was on friendly terms with many of Ireland’s best-known writers, actors, poets and painters including Keating, Hilda Van Stockum, Maurice MacGonigal, Harry Kernoff, Patrick Kavanagh, Myles na gCopaleen, F.R. Higgins and John Ryan.O’Sullivan was an extraordinarily talented artist who could turn his hand to any medium. Although perhaps better known as a portrait painter, he was a keen observer of life on the western seaboard of Ireland. He painted the landscape and people, both young and old, of Connemara and Kerry.’ |
| —Biog. notice posted on FB by David Britton on Irish Modern Artist Group - 23.06.2021. |
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Notes
Seán O’Faolain, speaking of portraiture in general, and considering the personality rather than the type in O’Sullivan’s Yeats, wrote: ‘the peculiar, slanting shape of his eyes, or the long droop of his fingers so well observed by O’Sullivan in the portrait that used to hang in the foyer of the Abbey Theatre’ [and still does]. (Vive Moi, 1946; cited in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991, q.p.)
The Poor Mouth: An Beal Bocht Flann O’Brien, trans. by Patrick Power as The Poor Mouth (1964), was published with illustrations by Seán O’Sullivan. (See Fintan O’Toole, Black Hole, Green Card: The Disappearance of Ireland (Dublin: New Island 1994).
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