A nude woman with hands raised laments over a prostrate man with a lake in the background.
Expand
Close

Lament of Aicell, The

Currie, John

1912

Artwork Information

  • Title:

    Lament of Aicell, The

  • Artist:

    Currie, John

  • Artist Bio:

    British, 1883–1914

  • Date:

    1912

  • Medium:

    Oil on canvas

  • Dimensions:

    28 x 36 inches

  • Credit Line:

    Wichita Art Museum, Edmund L. and Faye Davison Collection

  • Object Number:

    1968.39

  • Display:

    Not Currently on Display

About the Artwork

Ed Davison purchased this painting at a sale in the late 1920s. The painting came on the market from the estate of John Quinn, (1870-1924), a distinguished attorney and patron of modernist art. In Quinn’s records the painting is subtitled “an Irish Legend”:

“Uch Oll” (The Great Lamentation) where Aicell, the daughter of Cairbrй (Cairre Niafear, monarch of Erinn), laments Erc, the son of Cairbrй, who was slain in revenge of Cuchulainn.” 1

Currie was trained as a ceramist and painter. His art was influenced by avant-garde writers and artists who wanted to free British art from the Victorian Age through the adoption of artistic styles based upon the rational of artistic styles based upon the rational forms of geometry an/or the “primitive” pictorial conventions of the early Italian Renaissance.

1The University of Michigan, Lectures on the Manuscripts Materials of Ancient Irish History, Eugene O’Curry (1796-1862).