Professor Butter Beard’s “Potato Gathering”
Walter Frederick Osborne (Irish, 1859-1903), “Potato Gathering,” 1888, oil on board.
I sat outside this morning with my coffee letting myself escape into smiling memories of my time exploring Ireland with my art history brother Colin Brady. He and I were finishing our master’s program in London and needed an impromptu adventure outside of writing our theses. We caught a cheap flight to Dublin and spent a week exploring the city, the museums (The Book of Kells!), the pubs, his family’s cooking (the best Shephard’s Pie I have ever eaten), the pubs, the burial mounds and double rainbows over the sea, the pubs, and tipsy chuckles with strangers that felt like immediate hugs.
Walter Frederick Osborne is remembered in Ireland for his engaging, charismatic personality – one of those souls who could embrace you with a laugh. Today, he is identified as an Irish Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscape and portrait painter, best known for his documentary depictions of late 19th century working class life. Stephen Gwynn expanded this label when he wrote an article about his friend Osborne in 1943 for “An Irish Quarterly Review.” He wrote, “a man bred to the county will recognise the features of a countryside or the colours of a sky rendered with fidelity and instinctive knowledge; but there was revealed to Osborne also harmonies of colour, delicacies of atmospheric effect which the ordinary man would scarcely have discovered – the pearly quality of Irish air.”
According to Gwynn, you cannot understand Osborne’s work without remembering that he was the son of an excellent animal painter. William Osborne was a successful artist and member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, who specialized in painting portraits of horses and dogs for the then prosperous Irish landlords. Walter inherited his father’s talent and produced many of his first paintings featuring mellow landscapes populated with cattle, sheep and pigs. Whatever animal he painted, he painted with the knowledge and passion learned from his father. He studied sheep until he knew how to know one sheep from another as a shepherd does. Pigs he also painted with delight, little black Berkshire pigs in particular, but unfortunately, he found pigs unmarketable.
Osborne won the Taylor Scholarship in 1881 and 1882, which allowed him further his studies as an art student in Antwerp. He went on to paint in Brittany and England, but he returned to Ireland often to make preparatory sketches for what became his most renowned series depicting the everyday lives of the Irish poor. He would spend every day and all-day painting in the open air of the countryside. Some of his most favorite characters were the Claddagh women of Galway with their deep weathered faces, damp linen shawls and heavily-laden fish baskets. He captured the street vendors in the markets, the farmers at milking time, and the children with their cherished kittens and pups. As respected as the paintings are today, Gwynn surmised that this work was actually not suited to him. “He was too courteous to investigate the recesses of any one else’s character, to try and see the man or the woman behind the face.”
In 1903, Osborne returned home to Rathmines in Dublin to care for his young niece and his beloved elderly mother who lay at death’s door. In need of a breathing space, he spent an afternoon outside gardening, caught a chill which he neglected and died from pneumonia at the age of only forty-three. Gwynn wrote of his friend: “I never knew a man who seemed more likely than Walter Osborne to live to a happy and vigorous old age. The reason he gave up his painter’s way of life was simply that he was before all thing a good Irish son.”
The Irish Potatoes I made today were obviously not the ones harvested by the women in Osborne’s painting. But I hope they do embrace a taste of the sweet green countryside and the welcoming laughs of its inhabitants. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
“Irish Potato” Truffles
18-20 Truffles
Truffles:
2 cups unsweetened coconut flakes, lightly toasted and cooled
2 cups confectioners’ sugar
Dash of kosher salt
¼ cup heavy cream
½ tsp vanilla paste
“Dirt”:
2 tsp dark cocoa
2 Tbsp cinnamon
2 Tbsp confectioners’ sugar
1) Gently toast the coconut in a non-stick pan over medium heat until slightly golden and aromatic. Make sure to shake the pan often so the coconut does not burn. Set aside to cool.
2) In a food processor, pulse the cooled coconut flakes and 1 cup of the confectioners’ sugar to a coarse sand texture.
3) Dump the coconut/sugar into a bowl and stir together with the remaining cup of confectioners’ sugar, salt, heavy cream and vanilla paste.
4) Line a baking sheet with parchment and portion the mix into 1-inch balls. Set aside to airdry for one hour.
5) In a small bowl, stir together the dirt – the cocoa, cinnamon and confectioners’ sugar. Roll the truffles quickly in your hands to smooth and round them and then roll them in the dirt to coat. Let airdry again on a wire rack this time for about twenty minutes before eating them all!
Walter Frederick Osborne, “Dublin Streets: a Vendor of Books,” 1889 and “A New Arrival,” 1885.
