For many years Seán Keating held the torch as the most stalwart defender of traditional painting in Ireland. Born in Limrick, he attended the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art from 1911, becoming the most important pupil of William Orpen, for whom he acted as model and assistant in London in 1915. He was greatly impressed by a visit to the Aran Islands around 1913, and adopted the cause of Irish consciousness begun by Yeats, Orpen and Paul Henry. He turned his attention increasingly to Irish nationalism, of which Men of the South is a key production. By the later twenties his work had evolved towards allegorical themes of a less militaristic nature, the artist having grown disillusioned with the men of violence. He began to show at the Royal Academy in London, and in 1930 he held a one-man exhibition at the Hackett Gallery, New York. He was apointed professor of the National College of Art in Dublin in 1934, and from 1948 to 1962 was president of the Royal Hibernian Academy. Despite the flourishing growth of abstraction during his tenure, he doggedly remained a figurative painter, resolutley adhering to academic principals of draughtmanship and subject, along with an insistance of high skills to back them up.

Men of the South represents Keating at the peak of his attachment to nationalist themes. It depicts, in heroic mould, a 'flying column', apparently ready to ambush a passing military vehicle during Ireland's War of Independance. It was painted from sketches and photographs which Keating made of revolutionaries invited to sit for him, a situation made possible by the truce from the summer to the winter of 1921. During this period, members of the North Cork Batallion of the IRA, including Commt Mick O'Sullivan, were able to travel to Dublin, where they sat for Keating in his studio at the Metropolitan School of Art. It appears that porters there were drawn from the Crown forces, who were, terrified to encounter there sitters, armed with their rifles wrapped in brown paper.

Subject and painter are perfectly matched, and the theme an ideal vehicle for Keating's devotion to the high aspiration of history painting. The arrangement of the waiting men play on the memory of heros from a classical frieze, their profile heads here enlivened by an incisive realism of detail. But inspite of the crisp realism, Men of the South, clearly aims at an elevated vision; inevitably it is the clarity of ideals - courage, resolve, self-sufficiency - which are evoked, rather than the confusions and contradictions of guerrilla war.