Irish painter, born in Limerick. He studied at Limerick Technical College and in 1911 won a scholarship to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where he was taught by *Orpen, whom he idolized. Later he taught at the School himself and he was president of the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1948 to 1962. Keating is best known for his vigorous, picturesque portrayals of Irish peasants, above all for Men of the West (1915, Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane). ‘It is Keating who sums up the “discovery” of the West of Ireland as a source for patriotic, heroic, almost propagandist subject-matter which seems to have been adopted by the independence movement to straightjacket Irish art into nationalist terms’ (Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, The Painters of Ireland, 1978).

Text source: A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art (Oxford University Press)


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