Clúdach: Cover

The covers of our 2013 volume have present four unfamiliar works by the artist Seán Keating (1889-1977). The last of these is Portrait of May, an oil painting on two pieces of board that dates from 1919 or 1920.

The subject of Portrait of May is the artist's wife, and the work is a study for a larger painting that is now held is now in a private collection. Dr. Éimear O'Connor discusses May at length in a chapter titled "The One Woman" in her book Seán Keating: Art, Politics and Building the Nation, which was published this spring by Irish Academic Press. In this portrait, May clearly looks Spanish with a flower in her hair and a fan. She had, in fact, grown up in Spain after her mother died. May returned to Dublin from Spain in 1916, and she met Keating that year. They married in 1919. May was a left-thinking political activist who among other roles served as secretary to Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, and later was involved with the ambulance brigade that went into Spain to treat those fighting on the republican side of the Spanish Civil War. Yet, at her request, Keating never portrayed May as an activist in his work.

We thank the Keating Estate for kind permission to present this image. This painting, too, is now held in a private collection. We are also grateful to Dr. O'Connor of the TRIARC-Irish Art Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin for having so generously assisted us in presenting this memorable work to our readers, and for help in composing this note.