Tony O'Malley (b. 1913, d. 2003) Van Gogh, Winter (from a dream)

sThis bleak winter landscape was inspired by a dream O'Malley had about the artist Vincent Van Gogh, in which he was trapped by constrictive walls, until the pursuit of painting provided him with the necessary release. O'Malley's landscapes can be interpreted as expressions of his own state of mind. Here, the solitary figure and winter setting speak of desolation and despair. The head of Van Gogh closely resembles self-portraits by O'Malley, demonstrating his identification with the painter.

Both Van Gogh and O'Malley came to painting late in life; O'Malley at the age of forty-five, after ill-health prompted him to take early retirement from his clerical job at a bank. O'Malley's struggle with tuberculosis meant he spent much of his early adulthood in convalescence after a series of lung operations. This time of confinement, spent in a sanatorium and small rural Irish towns, heightened his awareness of the sense of isolation and anguish, which the artist he so revered, Van Gogh, had suffered during his mental illness. By the time O'Malley had made this work his dream of a release had become a reality. Van Gogh, Winter (from a Dream) was made after he moved to the artists' colony of St. Ives, Cornwall, in 1960, where he lived for thirty years.