Seán McSweeney was born in Dublin in 1935. Self-taught, the artist has come to be known as one of Ireland’s most eminent contemporary romantic landscape painters. Likely inspired by the passion his own father displayed as a keen amateur artist (whose work was shown at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin), McSweeney needs little more to be inspired than the Co. Sligo coastline, where he spent his summers as a child before settling there permanently in the 1980s.
Indeed, the artist’s corpus is thematically contained to his direct environment. The Phoenix Park in Dublin provided his first source of inspiration. After getting married and moving to Co. Wicklow in 1967, this new county would offer the means to create. Nevertheless, his most celebrated work is almost entirely based on the small area of the shoreline and bogland that surrounds his home on a small peninsula in Co. Sligo. With remarkable consistency of vision, he forged a personal style of representation that absorbed traditional and contemporary artistic elements while always staying rooted in the character of the Irish rural landscape.
His first solo exhibition was at the Dawson Gallery in Dublin in 1965. Since then, he has collaborated further with the Dawson Gallery and the Taylor Galleries in Dublin, the Fenderesky Gallery in Belfast and the John Martin Gallery in London.
Major retrospective exhibitions include: Retrospective 1965-1990 at the Galway Arts Festival and Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Gallery, Dublin in 1990 and Seán McSweeney – Retrospective at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork and the Solstice Arts Centre, Navan in 2007. He represented Ireland abroad on many occasions, including at the Sense of Ireland Festival, London in 1980 and the 1985 International Festival of Painting in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France.
McSweeny was the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Oireachtas Award (1968), the George Campbell Travelling Award (1980), the Carroll Award and a medal at the Claremorris Open Exhibition (1987-1978).
He was elected a member of Aosdána in 1984, the same year he moved with his family to his mother’s birthplace of Ballyconnell in Co. Sligo where he lived up until his death in 2018.
