Alfred Henry O'Keeffe

Alfred Henry O'Keeffe (21 July 1858 - 27 July 1941), was a notable New Zealand artist and art teacher, who spent the majority of his life in Dunedin. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, he was one of the few New Zealand artists to engage with new ideas while staying in New Zealand. At this time most adventurous New Zealand painters, such as Frances Hodgkins, went overseas. He has sometimes been described as a Vasari - a recorder of artists and their doings - based upon his published recollections, which are the only first hand published account of that milieu.

O'Keeffe was born in Sandhurst, Victoria, Australia in 1858. By c.1865 he and his family had moved to Dunedin. O'Keeffe studied at the Dunedin School of Art c.1881-86 and later at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1894-1895. He started exhibiting at the Otago Art Society in 1886 and also exhibited with the Canterbury Society of Arts, the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, the Auckland Society of Arts, South Canterbury Arts Society and the Wanganui Society of Arts and Crafts.

The demands of providing for his wife and six children meant O'Keeffe could not always afford to work as a full-time artist. Before going to Paris he managed the Liverpool Arms Hotel in Dunedin. After his return, from 1896–1905, he ran the Outram Hotel.

He also supplemented his income by teaching art. While living at Outram he took private classes in Dunedin, walking the 14 miles between. He taught at the Dunedin School of Art from 1912 until its temporary closure in 1920. In the early 1920s he taught at the 'Barn Studio' with Mabel Hill. Her 1913 portrait of O'Keeffe is now in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.

Four of O'Keeffe's six children predeceased him. His two sons Lawrence and Victor were both killed in 1915 at Gallipoli. This experience is commemorated in his best known painting The Defence Minister's Telegram (1921, Dunedin Public Art Gallery), which shows an elderly man receiving news of his son's death. One of his daughters died in 1917 and another in 1939.

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