Painted at Portmarnock in 1913 — a boy whose father shared the Martello Tower with James Joyce.
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Oliver St John Gogarty commissioned this portrait in 1913 to mark his son Noll's recovery from appendicitis. Orpen painted the six-year-old boy standing on the dunes at Portmarnock Strand — the same stretch of coast where both families spent their summers, where Noll and Orpen's own daughters played together in the dunes.
Gogarty was one of the great figures of the Irish Literary Revival — surgeon, senator, playwright, wit, and the man who shared the Martello Tower at Sandycove with James Joyce in 1904. Joyce turned him into Buck Mulligan on the opening page of Ulysses. By 1913, when this was painted, Gogarty and Orpen were close friends — ferrying each other to liquid lunches in the Dublin countryside, moving through the same world of writers, artists and politicians that defined the Revival at its height.
The painting is a portrait of a child, but it is also a portrait of that world — Dublin in the last quiet years before everything changed.
This archival giclée print is made on heavyweight fine art paper with fade-resistant inks, built to last.
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