Irish Oil Paintings: What to Look For, the Painters, and Original vs Print

Irish oil paintings are best approached by deciding what you want: an original canvas with a history, a work by a living painter, or a good reproduction of a painting that already hangs in a national collection. Buy Irish Art sells prints, not original oils, so this guide is honest about the difference and about where originals are actually found.

Searches for Irish oil paintings and original paintings for sale in Ireland tend to mix three different things. Sorting them out first saves time and money.

What counts as an Irish oil painting

Oil on canvas was the dominant medium of Irish painting from the eighteenth century onward. Portraits, landscapes and genre scenes were all painted this way, and the paintings now in the National Gallery of Ireland are overwhelmingly oils. When a gallery label reads "oil on canvas", it means pigment ground in oil, applied in layers to stretched linen or cotton, and the surface usually shows brushwork, thickness and slight variations in sheen.

That physical surface is the one thing a print cannot give you. What a print does give you is the composition, the colour relationships and the subject, which for most people hanging a picture on a wall is the reason they wanted it.

The painters worth knowing

A few names account for much of what people mean by "Irish painting". Walter Osborne painted Dublin's parks and streets with a quiet, observant touch; his story is told in Walter Osborne: the painter who said no. John Lavery moved between portraiture, society scenes and intimate interiors such as The Green Sofa (1903), and William Orpen, his rival and contemporary, is covered in William Orpen: the Irish painter who walked away from Ireland.

Sarah Purser built a career in portraiture and later founded the stained-glass studio An Túr Gloine, a story in Sarah Purser: the woman who built Irish art's institutions. Roderic O'Conor went to Brittany and Paris and absorbed Post-Impressionism, and Mainie Jellett brought Cubist abstraction home, which Irish Modernism: How Cubism Reached Ireland explains. For a wider view, What Is Irish Art? A Short History puts them in order.

Buying an original

If you want a genuine oil painting, the realistic routes are these:

• Irish auction houses such as Whyte's, Adam's and De Veres hold regular sales of historic and modern Irish art, with printed catalogues that give size, medium and provenance.
• Commercial galleries in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Galway sell work by living painters and are the best place to ask questions face to face.
• Open exhibitions, including the annual Royal Hibernian Academy show, let you buy directly from working artists at a wide range of prices.

Whichever route you take, ask for the medium and size, the condition, and any provenance or documentation. A dealer or auction specialist should be glad to answer all three. For older paintings, ask whether the canvas has been relined or restored, since that affects both value and care.

Be wary of anything described as "oil painting" that is in fact a printed or digitally painted reproduction on canvas, especially from unnamed sellers. A real oil has an uneven surface you can see at an angle, and a signed work should come with a clear account of who painted it.

Prints as the practical alternative

Originals by the best-known Irish painters are mostly in museums, or priced at levels that put them out of reach for a living room. A print of the same painting is the usual way to live with it. Our prints are made from images of artworks in public collections, on archival paper or canvas, and come framed or unframed.

It helps to be clear about what you are buying: a reproduction, not an original, and not a limited-edition investment. Its value is in the image on your wall. Jellett's Composition (Chessboard) 1925, described in its listing as oil on canvas, is a good example of a painting few of us could ever own that works well at home as a print.

Where to start looking

Start with subject. The Irish landscape and seascape prints cover coast, mountain and countryside, and the canvas prints suit anyone who prefers the look of a stretched canvas. If you already have a painter in mind, browse the collections for Walter Osborne, John Lavery, Mainie Jellett or Sarah Purser.

For the full range, the Irish art prints collection is the hub, and the page of Irish artists we print lists every painter we carry.