76
73 George Campbell RHA (1917-1979) Still Life With Many Thingssigned lower right and titled on reverse
oil on board
91.5 x 104cm (36 x 41in)
Provenance:
By descent from the artist;
De Veres, Dublin 27th June 2000, Lot 27;
Private Collection
€12,000-15,000 (£10,434-13,043)
Born in Arklow, Campbell began painting during the Blitz in Belfast and held his first solo exhibition
in Dublin with Victor Waddington, 1946. Receiving stained glass commissions from the Church in the
early 1960’s marked a turning point in the artist’s career. Prizes followed which attracted positive press
coverage leading to more demand for his work.
Fascinated with Spain from childhood, Campbell visited Spain in 1951 with his wife, Madge and
Gerard Dillon, and returned to Andalusia annually for the winter months till the late 1970’s. It’s likely
Campbell made a sketch of this work while in residence in Spain and transferred it to an oil painting in
Ireland as “many things” were sourced from a beach.
“Jorge” Campbell as his Spanish friends knew him was a fluent Spanish speaker and an accomplished
Flamenco guitarist. By the 1960’s music in Ireland and Spain became intertwined in his life and it
affected his painting. Influenced by Braque, Campbell’s still life paintings are never rigid or set in
formal surroundings. Flashes of colour, shifting forms and emerging shapes permeate the surface add-
ing mystery, vitality and movement.
Campbell painted still life from the early 1950’s often with a window view from his apartment and
he revisited the subject throughout his career but his approach to it changed over a thirty year period.
Never wishing to wait for inspiration, he usually worked on a few paintings at the same time, employ-
ing a variety of techniques with contrasting colour to achieve variations of form. Pale and strong colour
is combined with dark and warm browns resulting in a coherently balanced composition.
Versatile, Campbell did not confine himself to easel painting. He wrote articles for “The Artist maga-
zine and published Eyeful of Ireland, 1974, a comic interpretation of history in Ireland. He illustrated
for W.J.Hogan’s “Out of Season”, 1978, designed setting for the theatre, and contributed to television
programmes on Ireland, Spain and Flamenco music.
A romantic, Campbell stated that painting was part of his “whole fabric, part of breathing and reading
and eating and sleeping and walking and moving.” Kenneth Jamison remarked in his foreword for the
artist’s Arts Council exhibition, 1966 that Campbell had an “intuitive feeling for life-and for art as es-
sential element of living, that makes George Campbell in both his person and his painting, so exciting
to be with.”
Karen Reihill