Morgan O'Driscoll Irish & International Art Auction 21st October 2019

100 71 Louis Le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) Study Towards an Image of W.B.Yeats (1982) (W658) signed and dated 1982 verso watercolour and crayon 61 x 46cm (24 x 18in) Provenance: Ivey-Selkirk Auctioneers, St. Louis, MO, USA - 31st March 2007, Lot 498; James Wray Gallery, Belfast; Private Collection €20,000-30,000 (£17,699-26,548) Louis le Brocquy had a famously transformative experience when he visited the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and came across a number of Polynesian painted skulls in 1964. These precious objects, partly reconstructed with clay and then decorated, reminded him of the Celtic cult of the head as a repository of the spirit. By then, le Brocquy had devised a new way of painting the human figure - as a spectral presence emerging from a white ground. And he had made some exploratory paintings purely of heads as summarizing the essence of the person. Now he set about evoking the lost human presence in a more systematic way via paintings of the head, beginning with subjects from antiquity and eventually visualising his own father in paint. Then, in 1975, he was approached with a commission to make an aquatint of a Nobel prizewinner. Which one was up to him? He thought about it and settled on WB Yeats. Work on this one aquatint was to set him on a path to the paintings for which he probably remains best known, his studies of literary figures, mostly Irish literary figures. As he worked on study after study of Yeats, he came to feel that each fragmentary glimpse offered an insight of its own, that he could not really settle on one definitive image. As it was, he had begun to describe his portrait heads as “reconstructed” images, and then “study towards an image of...” This seemed to him more accurate and honest than any claim to absolute authority. The subject, whoever it might be, retained an essence and mystery beyond the partial view offered by each study. Aidan Dunne, September 2019