Important Irish Art
,
wednesday !"th May !#$% at &pm
127
freezing cold maids quarters or vacated studios of other painters.
Patrick and the Irish community soon found out that the garrets
and the amounts of red wine he drank could only be survived
with regular healthy warm food. His occasional disappearance
meant we would @nd him in public wards of Paris hospitals.
Ais is where I came in; back from work to my apartment on
Rue Duroc, I relaxed cooking hearty dishes, in anticipation of
the possible visits from Montague and our bohemian friends. To
my delight Patrick became a permanent @xture and the two of us
became dear friends. I enjoyed Patrick’s company and his rivet-
ing tales of his childhood in Sligo as Patrick o?en spoke of his
homesickness for Sligo and his wife Patricia.
In 1972 John and I moved to Cork. With the friendship of Sea-
mus Murphy - pivotal to the Lavitt Gallery, the @rst thing we
did was to organize the Hendrik’s Gallery to bring a one-man
show of Collins’ work to Cork which they did in March 1973.
At this show John bought
Lake Siren
as a gi? for me. Ae show
was a relative success for those times with eight works selling
to the likes of Richard Wood and Maurice Fridberg as well as
ourselves.
I have always felt
Lake Siren
to be unique. Ae theme of
Lake
Siren
speaks of Patrick’s nostalgia for the lost landscape of
Sligo, a landscape he kept referring to during those Parisan
evenings. It was a nostalgia which eventually brought him
back to Ireland fulltime in 1976”.
-Evelyn Montague, April 2013
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