Hugh Lane Gallery is pleased to support the exhibition, Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin 1880–1900, at the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, with the loan of eleven works. The exhibition opened on 19 August and continues to 7 December 2025.
Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin 1880–1900 brings together Osborne’s masterpieces from public and private collections to examine the trajectory of his tragically short career. From his student work in Dublin and Antwerp to his sparkling portraits of Dublin’s elite that earned him international acclaim, Osborne was an astute witness to the dramatic changes unfolding in his native city in the late 1800s.
His painting At the Breakfast Table (1894), which was acquired by the Raclin Murphy Museum in 2019, is the springboard for this presentation. The canvas marks his return to Ireland following the death of his sister, Violet, to help raise her infant daughter who was sent to be brought up by the artist’s aging parents in the family home in Rathmines.
Hugh Lane Gallery has lent two other important paintings of Osborne’s domestic sphere, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother and Tea in the Garden, an unfinished late work that depicts an afternoon tea in his Dublin neighbours’ garden. Four examples of his deftly painted oil studies from HLG are also on display, In an English Village, Village with Stream, Street Scene, Stream in Wood, as is his virtuoso sketch of Maud Gonne. His sensitive study, Mother and Child, is hung alongside two other works that feature the same figures, In St Stephen’s Green (The O’Brien Collection) and In a Dublin Park, Light and Shade (NGI). Three works from HLG depicting the area around St Patrick’s Cathedral, a favourite subject of Osborne, are included: The Fishmarket, Interior, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and Marsh’s Library.
Alongside works from the Hugh Lane Gallery and the Raclin Murphy Museum are loans of important paintings and drawings from the National Gallery of Ireland, Limerick City Gallery of Art, the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, the British Museum and private collectors in Ireland and the United States. Joseph Antenucci Becherer, director of the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art noted that the exhibition represents “years of dedicated curatorial effort in Ireland, England, and across the United States” and “freshly illuminates an exceptional artist and the city and people of Dublin itself.”
Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin 1880–1900 is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which includes essays by Cheryl Snay, Curator of European and American Art before 1900 at the Raclin Murphy Museum, Judith Stapleton, research fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, Logan Sisley, Head of Collections at Hugh Lane Gallery, Brendan Rooney, Head Curator and Curator of Irish Art at the National Gallery of Ireland, and Kathryn Milligan, Irish art scholar and Assistant Librarian at the National Institute of Visual Arts Library.
Admission to the Raclin Murphy Museum is free. For more information on opening hours and special events associated with the exhibition, visit raclinmurphymuseum.nd.edu.
Installation view of ‘Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin, 1880–1900’. Photo courtesy of Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, 2025.
Installation view of ‘Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin, 1880–1900’. Photo courtesy of Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, 2025.
Installation view of ‘Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin, 1880–1900’. Photo courtesy of Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, 2025.
Installation view of ‘Homecoming: Walter Osborne’s Portraits of Dublin, 1880–1900’. Photo courtesy of Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, 2025.
