CAG.3248 Seán Keating, The Window, 1924, oil on canvas, 141 x 122 cm. Purchased, 2023. © Estate of Seán Keating.  

This WORK OF THE WEEK brings the outside in as we approach Imbolc and the coming of spring… 

Now a century old, The Window (1924) is a tender, meditative painting by Seán Keating that still seems fresh and of the now.  

Bathed in reflected light from the exterior world, it depicts a woman seated on a daybed under a large window. The figure appears to be quietly reading from a book, a gesture echoed in our screen-based behaviours of today. Writing of the artist’s model, his wife May, Éimear O’Connor notes that her gaze, though ‘never direct, is always suggestive of a lively intellect.’ 

Interestingly, the casement of the title is a type of three-part (tripartite) sash window, known as a Wyatt window. It is located on the bow-ended ground floor of Woodtown Manor in Rathfarnham, County Dublin, the eighteenth-century house in which the Keatings had rooms at the time. 

An activist, socialist, and feminist, May Walsh (1895-1965) had, for health reasons, finished her education near Seville in Spain. Returning to Ireland in 1916, she soon became a member of Conradh na Gaeilge where she met Seán Keating (1889-1977), whom she would marry at the University Church, St Stephen’s Green in 1919. According to Turlough O’Riordan, May was by this time an agnostic, describing ‘herself as “independent” on the marriage certificate.’ Politically active, she mixed with Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington and Dorothy Macardle, and later co-founded leftist journal, The Plough. 

Fun Fact: This painting was first exhibited at Aonach Tailteann a century ago, in 1924, and subsequently in Paris (1926) and New York (1929). Seemingly last appearing in public at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1946, it remained in a private collection for nearly seventy years until it was acquired by Crawford Art Gallery in 2023.  

The Window (1924) by Seán Keating currently hangs on our main staircase. 

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