The Ireland-U.S. Council Award for Outstanding Portraiture is an important part of the Ireland-U.S. Council’s program to support the Arts and Arts Education in Ireland. The esteemed award has been an important career marker for many of today’s successful portrait painters in Ireland and is presented in Ireland to an artist whose work is judged to be of outstanding merit.

Council member-company Fiserv is the principal financial sponsor of the Award for Outstanding Portraiture . As part of the sponsorship program associated with the Award, every Council member in the United States and in Ireland receives a copy of Ireland’s premier visual arts and heritage quarterly journal, 39 years in publication, the Irish Arts Review.

Other benefits for Council members include a program of discounts available through the Irish Arts Review to various arts events in Ireland. Also included are calendars of upcoming arts activities throughout the year plus online information on prices of Irish Art and results of auction sales.

The Dublin-based artist Francis O’Toole has been awarded this year’s Ireland–U.S. Council/Irish Arts Review Portraiture Award at the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Annual Exhibition for his portrait With Tomorrow. In the work, a woman stands with her back to the viewer. She is barefoot, wearing a crumpled dress of pale, blue-green, silky material. Although we cannot see the figure’s face, her stance suggests vulnerability and captivates our attention. This large, imposing painting goes beyond conventional portraiture to build up several avenues of exploration. It is a consummately executed work of art, with textures and surfaces meticulously painted, such as the roughness of the woman’s heels and the reddened creases of her elbows. We do not know who the sitter is, but we know that she is close to the artist. Her evident humanity is used in the work to express the fragility of existence and to encourage empathy with her predicament, which we also share.

O’Toole was encouraged by his mother to take up painting while he was recovering from the long-term effects of a serious accident. He studied at the Angel Academy of Art, Florence, where he received an academic training, mastering the basic elements of composition, form, colour, harmony and expression. He spent a summer working with the Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum, an admirer of Rembrandt. O’Toole combines working with the model with sketches, studies from life and photographs.

In addition to his knowledge of Old Master art, O’Toole has a prevailing interest in the work of modern Surrealists, such as Salvador Dali and Leonora Carrington. A Surrealist influence is evident in With Tomorrow, where the use of the Rückenfigur – a person seen from behind – dominates and where the surrounding space creates a tense and intriguing setting. O’Toole notes that this pose can be found across visual culture – in graphics, cinema and photography. In this painting, the Rückenfigur reflects a mood of quietude and self-containment, according to O’Toole, but it also invites the viewer ‘to share [the figure’s] journey and see the world through her eyes’. For the artist, this pose ‘addresses a particularly divisive time in our history, when our state of disconnection from ourselves, from each other and from the natural world seems greater than ever before’.

The left-hand wall in the painting is covered with slogans and equations that the artist states ‘have altered the world in many ways’ and which include Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Newton’s Second Law of Motion and Schrödinger’s Equation. There is a page taken from Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979). The colour wheel refers to colour that the human eye can perceive and there is a drawing by a child using these colours. The images of the emaciated male torso come from the self-portrait photographs of the philosopher David Nebreda, who suffers from a severe form of schizophrenia. There are also film titles, song lyrics and famous quotations, many of which refer to ideas of time and notions of space as real or imagined. This section of the painting poses questions and presents a puzzle for the viewer. The figure is a vehicle through which we are invited to confront or explore these questions. As already stated, we do not know who the sitter is. O’Toole asserts that, if he names her, ‘it will make it impossible for the viewer to become her, share her journey, and see the world through her eyes’. It is better that ‘elements of a painting… remain powerfully unknowable and open to multiple readings’.

The Royal Hibernian Academy’s 195th Annual Exhibition runs until 3 August, 2025.

Róisín Kennedy is Associate Professor in School of Art History and Cultural Policy at UCD and Director of the MA Art History, Curating and Collections.