Power, Arthur Richard (1891–1984), artist, critic, and author, was born 22 July 1891 on Guernsey, eldest among two sons and one daughter of Alfred Power, major in the Yorkshire Light Infantry, and Agnes Power (neé Farrell). Alfred's postings took them to Southsea (England), Mullingar, and Dublin before his death during the Boer war (1900). When ten years old Power paid his first visit to the family estate (Bellevue House, Co. Kilkenny, and various lands in Co. Waterford), which was owned by his uncle. He attended the Oratory School, Birmingham (1905–7), and then joined the army.
He served as a lieutenant in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and later the Fifth Lancers till badly gassed in early 1916. ‘The repentant (Ypres 1914)’, which appeared in his only collection of poetry, Thirty-one poems (1972), evokes his experience of the trenches. Invalided, he returned to his mother's house, 21 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin, in time to witness the 1916 rising. He attended meetings of the Hermetic Society of George Russell (qv), where he met W. B. Yeats (qv) and John Eglinton (qv). He also spent time at Bellevue and Belmullet, Co. Mayo (1917), where he met Paul Henry (qv), who advised him to visit Paris.
When officially discharged from the army (1919) he travelled to Paris via Italy (Rapallo, Pisa, Florence, and Rome). He lived in the Latin quarter – although he frequently flitted to Dublin – and became an art critic for the New York Herald, writing a weekly column entitled ‘Around the studios’. Depressed at the conservatism of Irish art, he and Henry, with financial assistance from Edward Martyn (qv), organised ‘Dublin Arts Week’ (January 1922). The week's main event was an exhibition at the Mills’ Hall entitled ‘Some modern pictures’ which included paintings by Cézanne and Matisse. Power loaned a Modigliani and a Maillol and gave a lecture on European painting at the Metropolitan School of Art. In 1924 he joined the United Arts Club.
In Paris literature vied with art for his attention. In 1920 he met James Joyce (qv) and, once he had overcome the family's initial wariness, became a regular visitor. He accompanied the Joyces on day trips, tutored Giorgio in English, and read some of Ulysses (1922) in manuscript. Power described Joyce as ‘like a barbed-wire fence to meet’ (‘Three friends’ in Thirty-one poems), nevertheless, in Conversations with James Joyce (1974) he tried to illuminate Joyce's mind. In this dialogue Power appears to exaggerate his own traditionalism with the aim of emphasising Joyce's modernism. The company of writers inspired Power to write two short plays, ‘The Drapier letters’ (in which Swift's conversion to Irish nationalism is attributed to his admiration for a good-hearted prostitute) and ‘Her ladyship – the poet – and the dog’. The former was staged at the Abbey (August 1927) and both were published in that year.
In 1930 he inherited Bellevue. He returned to Ireland, tried to manage the estates but failed, and sold them to the land commission. The sale prompted a series of elegiac articles for the Waterford News about Bellevue and his life. These were collected and (with a foreword by Henry) published as From the old Waterford house (1940). He wrote some art criticism for The Bell (1941–3) and became art critic of the Irish Times. Encouraged by David Marcus, he wrote some poetry and short fiction, which were published in Poetry Ireland and Irish Writing in 1952, but he increasingly concentrated on painting. In Paris he had painted a cubist portrait of Joyce, but later he painted in a faux-naïf style using pastels and oils. He regularly contributed to the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and RHA exhibitions. He was an honorary member of the RHA. The Taylor Galleries (1983) and the United Arts Club (1986) hosted retrospective exhibitions of his work.
He married (1924) Joan Berthon from Somerset, but this ended in divorce. In 1932 he married Doris Rhoda Keightley from Lincolnshire. They had a son, Roderick, and lived at 3 Kirkwood Park Avenue, Sandymount, Dublin. Power fell ill and Doris died in October 1983. He died 7 May 1984 at Leopardstown Military Hospital.