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COVER “King O’Toole” by Sean Keating (from the collection of Brian P. Burns) The editors of ÉIRE-IRELAND wish to thank Brian P. Burns for permission to reproduce Keating’s painting and Gregory Gromadzki, conservator of the Burns collection, for providing us with photographic assistance. Sean Keating, the Limerick-born artist celebrated for his creations of heroic icons of national identity in the decades following Irish independence , first exhibited “King O’Toole” in 1933. Here he conveys the new state’s romantic patriotism and nostalgia for its Celtic past. In “The King O’Toole and Other Relics of Old Decency,” Timothy O’Neill reveals a story in County Wicklow folklore of an old shepherd, living in a shack in the valley of Glencree, the landscape of Keating’s painting. Driving his sheep into Enniskerry twice a year, the old man would have a few drinks, and stirred to bitterness, march up the avenue to Powerscourt House shouting, “Leave my house, youse usurpers and impostors.” Regularly removed by the police and fined a shilling by the magistrate, Lord Powerscourt, the shepherd would nevertheless repeat his performance on the next market day. He was called the King O’Toole after the family who controlled the monastery of Glendalough and valleys around Enniskerry throughout the middle ages. Although the O’Toole lands near Powerscourt, one of Ireland’s great estates, were confiscated in 1589, the O’Tooles remained powerful in Wicklow until the seventeenth century. For O’Neill, Keating’s painting conveys the proud but sad defiance of a dispossessed line (53). Also writing about “King O’Toole” in America’s Eye: Irish Painting from the Collection of Brian P. Burns, Christina Kennedy notes the social and political implications of the work: King O’Toole is another of Keating’s heroic figures, whose countenance conveys noble suffering and perseverance. . . . A descendant of a powerful COVER 207 ancient chieftain from County Wicklow, Keating’s O’Toole lives a life of poverty and virtue, the qualities extolled by Eamon de Valera’s Ireland of the 1930s. Given the shabby clothes and worn expression of this graybearded figure, the title of the painting initially seems ironic: that O’Toole is king of all he surveys is improbable. His moral authority over the Wicklow glen, however, emerges in the way the figure echoes the mountain behind him in size and shape. This monumentality, as well as his sad but dignified repose, embodies a natural nobility. King O’Toole rests upon a stone wall and holds an empty pipe. In his isolation and poverty, O’Toole epitomizes the reality of life for those left abandoned in rural Ireland by the emigrating young (96). WORKS CITED Kennedy, Christina. “King O’Toole.” America’s Eye: Irish Painting from the Collection of Brian P. Burns. Ed. Adele Dalsimer and Vera Kreilkamp. Chestnut Hill, MA: Boston College Museum of Art, 1996. 96. O’Neill, Timothy. “The King O’Toole and Other Relics of Old Decency.” Dalsimer and Kreilkamp 53–56. COVER 208 ...