Lot 190 EAMONN O'DOHERTY (1939 - 2011)
Title: Emigrants (1999)
Medium: Bronze
Signature: Signed and Dated
Provenance: Private Collection
Framed
Along the Foyle waterfront in Derry / Londonderry, there is a striking sculptural tableau by
Eamonn O’Doherty. It consists of three groupings of figures and, one could say, the space between them. One features an elder couple, another a departing younger couple with their two children. On from them, a lone, seated young girl strains forward, seawards. The work is titled The Emigrants, and it acknowledges and commemorates Derry’s role as the main emigration port for the northern part of the island of Ireland. It was a significant point of emigration from as early as the late 17th century and well into the 1930s.
O’Doherty’s work encapsulates the emigrant experience from a personal, familial perspective to a wider, societal view. The central family group is reluctantly departing their ancestral homeland, bidding farewell to their bereft parents. The inescapable reality is that the disaster of the Great Famine pushed emigration figures to unprecedented heights. At the same time, the sculpture looks to a more optimistic future: the two children in the family carry a book and a fiddle: emblematic of Irish cultural traditions and creative potential. The other, single figure of the girl looks to the future with hope. This maquette-sized cast of the central family group is an outstanding, self-contained expression of the facts of the Irish emigrant experience, a tribute to the individuals and a recognition of their courage in adversity. It is rendered with an easy, expressive naturalism, unforced and fluent.
O’Doherty was himself from Derry and attended St Columb’s, though the family moved to Dublin when he was 11 or so. He studied architecture at UCD, though he was a man of many talents and interests and no single discipline could define or hold him. Nonetheless, he never abandoned architecture and was a lecturer at Bolton Street. A capable musician, he played several instruments including the flute and in the 1960s was road manager for Andy Irvine’s group Sweeney’s Men. He consistently photographed life around him, including the traditional Irish music scene. He brought a direct, unaffected approach to his work in the visual arts. In his forties by the time he turned to public sculptures, he found that his architectural knowledge and experience served him well in dealing with scale, proportion and the practicality of delivering projects. Throughout numerous commissions, he moved with ease from abstraction to representation.
Over time he produced a remarkable series of works, from the James Connelly monument at Liberty Hall to the widely admired Great Hunger memorial in Westchester County, New York. Public sculptures inevitably inspire controversy, and his Galway Hookers on Eyre Square in Galway attracted critical views. Most infamously, perhaps, his Anna Livia, originally on O’Connell St and now, in less than satisfactory form, in the Croppies Acre down the Liffey Quays, attracted a great deal of unfair comment for what is such a benign, likeable work.
Aidan Dunne,
July 2026
€4000 - 6000
48cm high; 47cm wide; 25.5cm deep (approx.)
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