Seán Keating (Born John Keating, Limerick, 28 September 1889 – Dublin, 21 December 1977) was an Irish romantic-realist painter who painted some iconic images of the Irish War of Independence and of the early industrialization of Ireland. He spent part of each year on the Aran Islands and his many portraits of island people depicted them as rugged heroic figures.
Seán Keating studied drawing at the Limerick Technical School before a scholarship arranged by William Orpen allowed him to go at the age of twenty to study at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. Over the next few years he spent time on the Aran Islands and then in London, at Orpen's studio. In 1916 he returned to Ireland where he documented the war of independence and the subsequent civil war. Examples include Men of the South (1921) which shows a group of IRA men ready to ambush a military vehicle and An Allegory (c. 1922) which uses an unlikely clustering of figures to represent the fractures in the nascent Irish state.
He was elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1923. One of the cardinal achievements of the Irish Free State in the latter half of the 1920s was the building, in partnership with Siemens AG, of a hydro-electric power generator at Ardnacrusha, near Limerick. Keating produced a considerable number of paintings related to this scheme, as with all his paintings, these are realistic in style, some are literal and some are allegorical compositions seeking to communicate his view of the construction work as an heroic, even mythological, act.
In 1939 he was commissioned to paint a mural for the Irish pavilion at the New York World's Fair. He was President of the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1949 to 1962 and showed at the annual exhibition for 61 years from 1914. Although Keating was an intellectual painter in the sense that he consciously set out to explore the visual identity of the Irish nation, and his paintings show a very idealized realism; he did have conservative views on art and exerted an influence against modern art in Ireland. Keating feared that the modern movement would bring back a decline in artistic standards. Throughout his career he exhibited nearly 300 works at the RHA, and also showed at the Oireachtas.[1]
He died on 21 December 1977 at the Adelaide Hospital and was buried at Cruagh Cemetery, Rathfarnham. The 1978 RHA Exhibition featured a small memorial collection of his work.[2]
Posthumous exhibitions of his work were mounted by The Grafton Gallery, Dublin (1986) and the Electricity Supply Board (1987). Sean Keating - The Pilgrim Soul, a documentary presented and written by his son Justin Keating, aired on RTE in 1996. [3]