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Osborne, Walter:
Irish, 1859-1903
Irish painter. The son of the animal painter William Osborne (1823-1901), he trained in the schools of the Royal Hibernian Academy (1876-81). In 1881 he won the Royal Dublin Society's Taylor scholarship and went to study at the Koninklijk Academie voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. Charles Verlat was the professor of painting, and Antwerp was then at the height of its popularity with students from the British Isles. In Antwerp and subsequently in Brittany, Osborne made contact with painters of the Newlyn school and other British naturalists. In Brittany he painted Apple Gathering, Quimperle (1883; Dublin, N.G.), a small greenish-grey picture of a girl in an orchard, which in subject and treatment shows the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage. Throughout the 1880s Osborne worked in England, joining groups of artists in their search for the ideal naturalist motif. In the autumn of 1884 he was at North Littleton, near Evesham (Heref. & Worcs), where he painted Feeding Chickens in weather so cold that his model, a young peasant girl, nearly fainted. It is carefully drawn but painted with the square-brush technique characteristic of Bastien-Lepage's followers, and is very close to the contemporary work of George Clausen and Edward Stott (1855-1918). At Walberswick in Suffolk he painted October Morning (1885; London, Guildhall A.G.), a carefully studied plein-air work using bright dots of pure colour on a base of beige and grey. During this time Osborne gave careful attention to the showing of his work. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin from 1877 and at the Royal Academy in London from 1886.
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