Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 12th November 2018

102 86 Patrick Swift (1927-1983) Dead Plover (c.1950) signed lower right oil on canvas 20.5 x 41cm (8 x 16in) Provenance: Private Collection Exhibited: Patrick Swift Exhibition: The Victor Waddington Galleries, 1952: Cat. No. 26 €5,000-€7,000 (£4,464-£6,250) This work was included in Patrick Swift’s first solo exhibition at The Victor Waddington Gal- leries in 1952 and shows the influence of the artist Lucian Freud on his work at this time. Swift had met Lucian Freud in 1949 and by 1950 Lucian was coming regularly to Ireland due to his courtship with his future wife Lady Caroline Blackwood of Clandeboye Estate in Northern Ireland. When in Dublin Freud used to come around in the mornings to Swift’s Hatch Street Studio to paint. Freud’s early influence on Swift - his junior by five years - is very evident in this work which is dispassionate, stylised and severe. Swift however was less preoccupied with texture and more concerned with tone; a dominant feature in the present work. Freud is known to have painted similar works like this alongside Swift such as ‘Woodcock on a Chair’ which was included in the same 1952 Waddington exhibition. In 1950 Swift showed his first works in public at the IELA; the following year at the same show his paintings were singled out by Dublin Magazine for their exceptional technical abil- ity and ‘uncompromising clarity of vision which eschews the accidental or the obvious or the sentimental’. The reviewer for the ‘Dublin Magazine’ especially singled out the small still lives for comment while reviewing the 1952 Waddington exhibition and said that they ‘show his power to convey the full impact of the object, as though the spectator were experiencing it for the first time. This curious clarity is a function of a restrained, I might even say, puritanical palette and of a cold light, uniformly diffused.’ Swift and Freud met again in London, where he co-edited a literary and arts journal, ‘X’, and mingled with other leading artists of the period including Francis Bacon, John Minton and Leon Kossoff. In 1962 Swift and his wife visited the Algarve where they eventually settled and established Porches Pottery as well as continuing with his painting. He continued to exhibit on occasion in Dublin and in 1993 a major retrospective took place in IMMA.