O'Driscoll, Stephen (McKechnie Section 1)

Recorded by Jackson (Dictionary), as Driscoll. I have been given more information about this artist by Donald Gildea, who owns a silhouette (illustrated) by O'Driscoll, on the reverse of which there is some written material, part of it from a newspaper cutting, headed ‘This Quaint Old Cork of Ours. By M. H.’. This information may be summarized as follows. Stephen O'Driscoll was born in c. 1825, probably in Cork, where at an early age he was apprenticed as a lithographer on the South Mall. Since he appears to have become acquainted with Augustin Edouart when he was in Cork in 1834, he was probably working for the lithographers Unkles and Klason, and it may have been O'Driscoll who was responsible for some of the ready-made lithographed backgrounds illustrated in Edouart's Treatise (see under Edouart). We do not know whether or not Edouart taught O'Driscoll the art of cutting silhouettes.

O'Driscoll appears in clue course to have worked both as a silhouette artist and as a cartoonist. He produced a number of portraits and caricatures of prominent inhabitants of Cork, from magistrates and town councillors to beggars. He designed and lithographed the address, printed on satin, which was given to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her visit to Cork in 1849 and designed the card of admission to the ceremony which took place during this visit. In the British Museum (Banks collection) there is a bookplate of the Rev. James O'Regan, signed ‘O'Driscoll, Lithog.’

The illustrated example of O'Driscoll's work represents, apparently, an incident, well known in Cork, which occurred in Patrick Street in 1843. Dan Callaghan, M.P., on leaving a hotel after luncheon, accidentally dropped a gold coin, which, as it rolled on the pavement, he attempted to recover. One Father Matthew, who was passing, picked up the coin and presented it to a mendicant known as the ‘King of the Beggars’. This fine picture has been engraved, and prints of it have been seen.

The artist's daughter (Mary O'Driscoll, q.v.) assisted her father with his work in his later years. Their joint signatures, ‘M. and S. O'Driscoll, 1870’, appear on a large picture in the Cork Museum named Assembly of Citizens in front of Commercial Buildings, South Mall. This picture shows an assembly of hundreds of figures, each of them a silhouette (cut out, touched with colour and pasted onto a mount) — an ingenious composition of its kind. Another similar group by the O'Driscolls (formerly in Queenstown) is entitled Assembly in Front of the Queen's Hotel. As many as fifty-two examples of O'Driscoll work were sold by Sotheby Parke Bernet, London, on 15 December 1975 and 26 January 1976.

Strickland states that O'Driscoll died on 20 February 1895, aged about seventy years. Presumably he died in Cork.

To summarize his qualities, O'Driscoll was a skilful cutter, who probably worked freehand, and specialized in producing group silhouettes set against lithographed backgrounds (although the trade label, or part of one, quoted by Jackson suggests that he also produced bust-length work). One would expect his earlier work to be housed in maple frames of the kind that he may have noticed in Edouart's stock.

The known examples of O'Driscoll's work are signed and dated. The text (whether complete or not) of the trade label quoted by Jackson reads thus: ‘Portraits and fancy subjects. Black shaded profile 2s. 6d. Black shades 1s. Exclusive of Frames and glass.’

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