Daniel O'Neill
Artist Bio
Born in Belfast in 1920, Daniel O’Neill was a predominantly self-taught landscape and figure painter. O’Neill briefly attended the Belfast College of Art and worked in the Belfast studio of Sidney Smith. During this time, he first met Gerard Dillon. He began working as an electrician, only painting in his spare time, until he gained a gallery contract with art dealer, Victor Waddington, in 1945.
After only painting full-time for seven years, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts organised a solo exhibition of O'Neill's work at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery. In 1948, his work began to appear abroad in London, New York, and California. He first exhibited with the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1947. O’Neill continued to show regularly in Dublin at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. In the early 1950s, he moved to an artist colony in Conlig, County Down, working closely with painters George Campbell and Gerard Dillon. O’Neill moved to London in 1958, returning to Belfast in 1970 with a comeback exhibition held at the McClelland Galleries.
O'Neill cited French fauvists, such as Maurie de Vlaminck and Henri Matisse, as influential on his artistic style. John Hewitt wrote, ‘his work has both a sensory and a sensual quality; that, though his subjects have, above all, a lonely poetry, he handles with most confidence the great commonplaces of being; birth, death, love, belief, wonder.’