The Devil's Glen, County Wicklow

James Arthur O'Connor's The Devil's Glen, County Wicklow of 1828 depicts one of the most dramatic natural landscapes in eastern Ireland, a deep, wooded gorge in the Wicklow Mountains through which the Vartry River flows. The Devil's Glen was a well-known picturesque destination for Dublin visitors and artists in the early nineteenth century, its combination of rocky outcrops, dense woodland, and rushing water providing the landscape drama that Romantic taste demanded. O'Connor painted the Glen repeatedly and is particularly associated with it as a subject, his versions varying in their balance between topographic record and Romantic atmospheric interpretation. The painting reflects the growing interest in Irish landscape as a subject with its own distinctive character, distinct from the more usual Alpine and Italian destinations of the pictorial Grand Tour.

O'Connor captures the enclosed, dramatic character of the gorge through vertical compositional elements — cliff faces, tall trees — that confine the sky and create a sense of intimate natural grandeur. The light penetrates the woodland in shafts, creating contrasts of deep shadow and sudden brightness characteristic of the scene. The palette is cool and verdant.