Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 29th April 2019

62 Born in Dublin, and originally destined for a life in the petrochemical business, Louis le Brocquy opted out to pursue his interest in painting, visiting the great museums and copying from the works of painters he admired. In this way he amassed a great deal of practical knowledge which, allied with his considerable natural abilities, left him well-informed on art history, current developments and technique. He initially worked in a mode of realism akin to that of Degas or Manet, but he was interested in aspect of Cubism, which left him at odds with the conservative establishment, and he was instrumental in establishing the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. His many fine paintings of family groups gradually alternate with works that focus increasingly on the isolated human presence, often in relation to larger social groups. These two basic themes continued to preoccupy him throughout his life. In 1954 he made landmark painting, ‘Children in a Wood’, inspired by a 17th century work by, it is thought, Cornelis Bisschop, ‘Boys Playing with a Goat.’ In the light of le Brocquy’s later painting, his 1948 drawing of children playing in a park in Paris looks prescient, suggesting that perhaps even then he had the idea in mind. It is a gentle and good-humoured composition with a mild Cubist twist. He returned to the children in a wood subject in the 1990s. In the meantime, he also went on to make a series of related paintings from the early 1960s, inspired by a 1939 news photograph of a group of Catholic schoolgirls in cheerful procession in Dublin on Bloomsday, the day of their confirmation. As regards the individual as subject, le Brocquy’s breakthrough came in the early 1960s, inspired by Polynesian painted skulls at the Musée de l’Homme and the Celtic head cult, he devised an approach to portraiture as “an archaeology of the spirit”, a means of looking beyond surface appearance. There followed his celebrated series of paintings of Beckett, Joyce, Yeats and other literary figures. He was in the midst of working on these when he made his charming Goldfish painting in 1984. Apart from perhaps being something of a break from grappling with the imaginative world of Beckett, his study of the humble goldfish is an opposite reminder of the transience of things. In an interview with Ann Cremin in Paris in November 1984 the artist stated ‘’For just twenty years now, I’ve been painting heads in one form or another. I imagine most of these heads are - when they emerge at all - essentially tragic, pertaining as they do to the past, to memory, to reflection ...... Nature is by definition ever present. It has no past other than its soil. I’ve tended to refer back to nature recently. I don’t think, however, that a painter consciously chooses his way. He hasn’t much say in the matter, not much decision. He simply does his best to catch some sort of inner tide, to avoid being stranded. Often I am stranded, but just now I seem to have caught a sort of ebb tide, to have returned to an older pre-occupation in a shift back to natural things around me - to growing plants and fruit and goldfish and fantail pigeons. Perhaps this is simply a temporary release from the heads and their intense reflective consciousness, their tragic aspect. A return to a simple state of being, emerging in its own nature, filling out its little volume of reality with the various natural possibilities of its form’’. In the 1985 Spring issue of ‘’The Irish Arts Review’’ Dorothy Walker refers to the ‘’Goldfish’’ series :- ‘’ Even in his paintings of Goldfish, le Brocquy has created a more intense reality than one can imagine emanating from that somewhat cool customer. If not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of the lilies of the field, then not even the Queen of Sheba could rival the dumb, frightened goldfish shimmying through a succession of present movements in a ukioye flow of self - images reflected in the side of her bowl, and bathed in the art-light refracted from the relativity of all living things’’. Aidan Dunne, March 2019 48 Louis Le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) Goldfish (508), (1984) signed and dated 1984 verso with artist’s archive no.508 oil on canvas 27 x 35cm (10.6 x 13.8in) Provenance: Taylor Galleries, Dublin (label verso); The Estate of William Roth; James Adam’s, Important Irish Art, Dublin,1st October 2014, Lot 46; Private Collection Exhibited: Louis le Brocquy: Procession of Lilies and other new work’’, Taylor Galleries March/April 1985 Cat. No. 22 €20,000-€30,000 ($22,471-$33,707) (£16,949-£25,423)