Born in Belfast in 1920, Daniel O´Neill left school at the age of fourteen to train as a housepainter. However, a keen interest in art led to his becoming a full-time artist. During the war years he worked in Belfast and Dublin; in 1944, he went to London to work on building sites. In 1958 Dillon represented Ireland at the Guggenheim International and also represented Britain at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition. He travelled on the Continent and taught for brief periods in London. In 1968 he was in Dublin, designing sets and costumes for Sean O´Casey´s play Juno and the Paycock. Dillon´s style of painting is personal and idiosyncratic. Inspired by Gauguin, Chagall, and van Gogh, his work also has its roots in nineteenth century Romanticism, with its emphasis on the nocturne, and on developing a sense of visual poetry. Another influence, or source, for Dillon´s art is magic realism, as seen in his dreamlike landscapes and interiors, peopled by mothers and children, farmers and fishermen, but also by pierrots and strange hallucinatory figures. The Yellow Bungalow (1954), his painting of a domestic interior with figures seated around a stove, is in the Ulster Museum

The painting Family, showing two women, one holding a child, leading a group of people along a dark road, was purchased in 1970. As with most of O´Neill´s paintings, the date, location or identity of the people is not specified. At one level, the painting can be read as depicting a family in the West of Ireland making their way home at dusk along an unlit road. The painting can also be read perhaps as evoking the plight of refugees, fleeing from a conflict. However, as with most of O´Neill´s paintings, the date, location or identity of the people is not specified. A sense of fear and unease is heightened by the artist´s setting the scene at nighttime. In similar vein, the poetic sense of The Way Home, a painting exhibited at the Dawson Gallery in Dublin in 1960, is heightend by the artist setting the scene at night. The painting represents figures making their way across a landscape, and while the white cottages in the background indicate a West of Ireland setting, again the image has a universal quality, referring to isolation and vulnerability.