Town of Westport and Clew Bay, County Mayo

James Arthur O'Connor was the leading Irish landscape painter of the early nineteenth century, and his Town of Westport and Clew Bay, County Mayo, painted in 1825, is among his most topographically specific works. Westport was developed in the late eighteenth century as a planned estate town for the Marquess of Sligo, and Clew Bay — studded with its famous drumlins — was a landscape of great natural beauty that O'Connor captures with the mixture of topographical accuracy and Romantic atmospheric sensitivity that defines his mature work. O'Connor spent most of his career in London and Paris, but he returned to Ireland periodically and Irish landscape remained central to his identity as a painter. This work participates in the growing cultural value placed on Irish landscape in the Romantic period, a landscape increasingly understood as expressing a distinctive national character.

O'Connor opens the composition toward the bay and its characteristic island-studded expanse, the town of Westport visible in the middle ground. The atmospheric sky occupies much of the upper half, its changing light modelling the landscape below. The palette is cool and naturalistic, the greens and blues of a west of Ireland summer dominant.