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Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
Goldfish, 1984 (508)
Oil on canvas, 27 x 34.5cm (10½ x 13½”)
Signed, dated 1984 and inscribed with reference 508 verso
Provenance:The Estate of William Roth
Exhibited :
Louis le Brocquy : Procession of Lilies and other new work,
Taylor Galleries March/April 1985 Cat. No. 22
This is one of three works entitled
Goldfish
included in the Taylor Gallery exhibition. After two
decades of mainly painting the human head and from 1975 the heads becoming more specific
people such as poets,writers and painters in 1984 the artist began to explore other subjects.The best
known were his
Procession of Lilies
series but he also painted nature, be it his ever popular
Fantail
Pigeons
, still lifes , peonies, bignonia and goldfish.
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”.
Dorothy Walker writing in the 1985 Spring issue of “The Irish Arts Review” 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.
€20,000 - 30,000
