Aran Rowers – oil on canvas
Thanks to an anonymous donor, the Fitzgerald Legacy has been able to acquire one of the artist’s last paintings, an oil on canvas of The Aran Island Rowers. Fitzgerald was visiting the Aran Islands when he died suddenly in 1971. He had planned to complete a major composition of these fishermen who brave the North Atlantic off the coast of these remote Irish islands, and this particular painting is likely a preliminary for that never completed work. Indeed, when Fitzgerald left his Monhegan studio in 1971 for his final voyage to Ireland, he left behind a large canvas already stretched within a silver-leaf gilded frame on which he had planned to complete a large oil painting of these Aran Rowers. Studies for this composition, donated by the Huberts to SUNY Plattsburgh in 1991, are visible on their website (see: www.plattsburg.edu). This small oil painting was part of a collection of five works owned by Dr. Robert Scully, a physician at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, who passed away in early 2012. Dr. Scully, a world renowned authority on the Pathology of Gynecologic malignancies, was a friend of Fitzgerald, and purchased this work form him in the late 1960s.