page_title: Walter Osborne
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Walter Osborne / Life / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Location: Dublin, Liffey, Aston Quay, Custom House, O'Connell Bridge
context_page_description: Walter Frederick Osborne was an Irish impressionist and Post-Impressionism landscape and portrait painter, best known for his documentary depictions of late 19th century working class life. Most of his paintings are figurative and focus on women, children, the elderly, the poor, and the day-to-day life of ordinary people on Dublin streets, as well as series of rural scenes. He also produced city-scapes, which he painted from both sketches and photographs. A prolific artist, he produced oils, watercolours, and numerous pencil sketches.
  Osborne's talent was evident as a young man and he traveled widely in his youth; studying at the Academie Royale des Beaux Arts in Antwerp. He became a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy after an early showing. Later, he spent time in rural England and Brittany, where he became acquainted with the style of the impressionists. Osborne produced works in oil, water-colour, pastel and pencil. His main source of income was portraiture, landscapes and depictions of animals, but he is today better known for his documentary depictions of Ireland's working class poor.
context_section_description: Walter Osborne was born in Rathmines, Dublin, the second of three sons of William Osborne, a successful animal painter who specialised in portraying horses and dogs for the then prosperous Irish landlords. By the 1880s, many landlords had hit economic difficulties, and William had to focus on painting mostly dogs.
  Walter learned from his father that there was money to be earned from painting animals, and he produced quite a few; including of children with their pets, notably his 1885 A New Arrival, and a series of impressionistic works on cows. Yet, according to art historian Campbell, in these paintings, "Osborne eschews the overly sentimental or literary quality of much Victorian genre painting, and displays a more down-to-earth, realistic approach, and a mood of gentleness."
  He was educated at Rathmines School and at the Royal Hibernian Academy school.
caption: Dublin Streets: a Vendor of Books, 1889.  From a series of studies of Dublin working-class people, which emphasised the plight and hardships of the city's poor
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "4800", "Image ImageLength": "3975", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image ImageDescription": "NGI 4736", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "4", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2008:10:23 14:00:43", "Image Artist": "Roy Hewson", "Image Copyright": "Photo \u00a9 National Gallery of Ireland\nNot to be reproduced or duplicated without written consent", "Image ExifOffset": "408", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "546", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6065", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "864", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "716"}