Joseph Malachy Kavanagh
Biography of Irish Artist: Landscape, Genre
Painter.
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Joseph Malachy Kavanagh |
 Playing by the Old Bridge. |
Joseph M Kavanagh RHA (1856-1918)Born in Dublin, his early artistic efforts were rewarded at the age of 12 when one of his pictures was accepted for the annual show of the Royal Hibernian Academy, and when (in the same year) he gained the silver medal in the Royal Dublin Society Christmas Competition. From 1877-8 he enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art as a free student, studying alonside contemporaries like Nathaniel Hill, Walter Osborne and Roderic O'Conor. In 1881, his composition featuring Medieval monks won the Albert Scholarship, after which he, Hill and Osborne travelled to the Academie Royale in Antwerp for the "Nature" course under Verlat. The following year they returned to take Verlat's "Life" class. Afterwards, the three spent time in Brittany and Normandy. |
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Although he stayed in France until 1887, Kavanagh continued to contribute works to the RHA, and on occasion to the Royal Academy in London. Most of his Continental paintings consisted of rural and city scenes from Antwerp, Bruges, Mont St Michel, Quimperle, Dinan and Pont-Aven. One of his masterpieces of naturalism from this period is The Old Convent Gate, Dinan (1883), now in the National Gallery of Ireland. Unlike most other Irish landscape painters of "The Antwerp School", he also developed an interest in etching, using this medium to produce numerous etchings of landscapes and architectural views. However, in comparison with Nathaniel Hill and Walter Osborne, Kavanagh was far less influenced by Impressionism, and showed little enthusiasm for plein-air painting. Instead, he was more affected by the style of the Dutch painter Anton Mauve (1838-88), one of the leading artists of the Neo-Romanticist Hague School,and by rural Realists like Jean-Francois Millet (1814-75). |
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In 1887, he returned to Dublin, settling in Clontarf where he concentrated on unpretentious local subjects - beaches, dunes, watercourses and coastal views - including numerous landscapes and seascapes of Howth, Dublin Bay and the sands of Sutton, Portmarnock, Merrion and the North Bull - another of his noted works being Cockle-Pickers on the North Bull Sands (1893). He was also drawn to marshes and riverbank scenes, especially those around Portmarnock Marsh and Killester Ponds. Meantime, in 1889, he was elected an Associate Member and in 1891 a full Academician of the Royal Hibernian Academy, where he continued to exhibit on a regular basis and also joined the teaching staff. In 1910, after he had moved to Blackrock, he was appointed Keeper of the RHA and took up residence in their premises in Lower Abbey Street. In 1916, he was present in the RHA building when it was set ablaze by exploding shells. The resulting inferno destroyed most of the RHA paintings, as well as Kavanagh's own studio. Although he was fortunate enough to escape with minor physical injuries, all his unsold paintings had been destroyed in the fire - a blow from which he never recovered. He moved into Moran's Hotel, and died two years later. Rare surviving examples of Joseph Malachy Kavanagh's paintings and drawings are represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery in Cork, the Limerick City Gallery of Art, the Ulster Museum. |
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More Information • For details of other creative practitioners
from Ireland, see: Irish Artists: Painters
and Sculptors. • NOTE: To update Joseph Malachy Kavanagh's biography, click Here.
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