Description
Autograph Letter Signed, explaining that “my time will be pretty well filled with work in preparation for one or two gentlemen for some four or five months to come”, but prepared to show his correspondent’s friend some sketches in his studio in Kensington. 3 pp. 7 x 4 inches, fine. Willesley, Staplehurst, 30 November, no year given. George Bernard O’Neill (1828 – 1917), was a prolific Irish genre painter, from 1859 a member of the Cranbrook Colony of artists. O’Neill also kept a home and studio in London, where he spent the winter months participating in the capital’s artistic life. In the 1870s, along with George Henry Boughton, he became friends with James McNeill Whistler and offered him moral support during the years 1877–78, when Whistler sued the critic John Ruskin for libel.