Timothy Healy – William Orpen Art Print

Hugh Lane Gallery Collection, Dublin.

Orpen painted Timothy Healy in 1908 as part of Hugh Lane's project to build a portrait gallery of Irish notables for the new Municipal Gallery in Dublin. Lane commissioned over thirty portraits in the series, and Orpen charged just £10 per sitting — a fraction of his usual rate of £200 — because he believed in what Lane was trying to do.

Healy was one of the most formidable figures in Irish political life. Born in Bantry in 1855, he entered Parliament in 1880, championed the rights of tenant farmers, broke with Parnell, survived every shift in Irish politics for four decades, and in 1922 became the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State — the new state's representative of the Crown, living under IRA death threats in the Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park.

Orpen painted him fourteen years before any of that. This is the portrait of a man in the middle of a long career, not yet at the end of it. The Hugh Lane Gallery has held it ever since.

Available as a 40x50 cm / 16x20″ archival giclée print on heavyweight fine art paper with fade-resistant inks, built to last.

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