Vases of flowers and a botanic garden with Saint Peter. Oil painting by O'Brien.

1 painting : oil on wood ; wood 55 x 66.3 cm (painted area)

Colman mac Oililla ain / As e tug an Inis Fail / mar do ordaig Rig n Rand / o chathair na fer forthend. Opem non parvam confert mortalibus aegris / Quisque potestates norit <plantarum?> et usum. / Vive vale. Si quid novisti rectius istis, / Candidus imperti; si non, ius nicre mocum. O'Brien fecit The first two lines of the inscription originate from the penultimate stanza of a recipe in verse within an Irish medical compendium, in eight quatrains, for the ailments known as atchomall ('dropsy') and loch tuile ('pulmonary disease'): "Colman mac Oililla ain/As e tug an Inis Fail/mar do ordaig Rig n Rand/o chathair na fer forthend" which translates as 'Fair Colman son of Oilill / it is he who took the Island of Ireland / as the King of the Stars has ordained / from the settlement of the very strong men' (Hayden, op. cit. 2019). The same lines of verse are quoted by the nineteenth-century Dublin herb doctor Michael Casey (fl. 1752?-1830) in a single-leaf prospectus for his never-published herbal, the Athanasia Hibernica, which was to be available by subscription in 1825. Casey had a background in reading medieval Irish books before he applied that study to medical texts, healing himself of a persistent malady and thereafter turning to the practice of prescribing remedies from medieval medical texts in Ireland (Sharp, op. cit.). Hayden suggests the signboard might have been created as an advertisement for this herbal. The original medieval treatise - which is believed to be a unique survival in Irish of a prosimetrical medical text - as a whole is mainly made up of herbal remedies and was copied by an individual who is known (mainly from manuscript marginalia) to have been a practising physician in the region of Roscommon, Ireland around the turn of the sixteenth century (Hayden) The second of the two pairs of Latin hexameters is a garbled version of Horace, Epistles I.6.66-67: "Vive vale. Si quid novisti rectius istis, / Candidus imperti; si non, his utere mecum"

"This painter may have been one Thomas O'Brien of Dublin, who exhibited a work described as ‘Venus soliciting Vulcan to make armour for her son’ at the 1778 exhibition of the Free Society of Artists in London. He is probably identical with the ‘Obrien Tommaso, Irlandese Pittore’ noted in Florence, Archivio di Stato MS 154 as having been elected as a member of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno on 21 September 1798"--Hayden, op. cit. (2021). In Italy, this O'Brien was a Dominican friar and an architectural draughtsman, and in 1799 he was Prior of Athy, County Kildare, having presumably returned to Ireland (Ingamells, loc. cit.)

John Ingamells, A dictionary of British and Irish travellers in Italy, 1701-1800 compiled from the Brinsley Ford archive, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1997, p. 719

Christopher Wright et al., British and Irish paintings in public collections, New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2006, page 610

Deborah Hayden, 'Attribution and authority in a medieval Irish medical compendium', Studia Hibernica 45 (2019)

Sharpe, R. Michael Casey (?1752–1830/31), herb doctor, his Irish manuscripts, and John O’Donovan. Eigse: A Journal of Irish Studies, National University of Ireland, Volume:40, 2019, pages 1-42

Hayden, D. Medieval Irish medical verse in the nineteenth century: some evidence from material culture. Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 45, Issue 168, November 2021, pages 159-177

Wellcome Collection 44690i