110 / 196
110
83
Louis Le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
Tinkers in Spring
Watercolour, 18.5 x 24cm (7¼ x 9½”)
Signed and dated 1945; title inscribed on gallery label verso
Exhibited: “Contemporary Irish Painting” Exhibition,The Gallery of the Associated American Artists,
Fifth Ave, New York March 1947 Cat. No. 29
‘Tinkers in Spring’
, one of many watercolours executed by Louis le Brocquy in the mid-1940s,
reflects a concern with injustice, poverty and dislocation, shared with many artists in wartime
Europe. While some of these watercolours record the life and landscape of Dooagh, Achill, and
others were sketches for the theatre, notably
Red Roses for Me
by Sean O’Casey, a great many, like
this one, were devoted to the lives of the Irish travelling community.
Tinkers in Spring
was one of
19 watercolours, by le Brocquy, almost all devoted to the subject of travelling people that were in-
cluded in an exhibition of fifty three works by eleven Irish artists at the Gallery of the Associated
American Artists on Fifth Avenue, New York in 1947, and chosen by Reeves Lewenthal, Presi-
dent of the Association. Le Brocquy, like Jack B. Yeats and Nano Reid, was very attracted to the
freedom and independence of the Travellers lifestyle, and even attended their annual gathering,
Puck Fair, in Killorglin on a number of occasions. In addition to the watercolours, the Travellers
inspired some of le Brocquy’s most important oil paintings and tapestries.
This watercolour represents a transitional moment in le Brocquy’s development. This is revealed
in the shift from the triangular head forms, that he derived from early medieval, Irish carving
such as the West doorway of Clonfert Cathedral or the High Cross at Moone in Co. Kildare, to
the more rounded facial types which reach their apogee in the well-known, A Family, from 1951,
which won him the prestigious Pre Alpina award at the Venice Biennale five years later.
Le Brocquy was a fine illustrator and this can be seen in his watercolours where the sweeping line
of his pen brings energy and definition to the figures of the couple in the foreground, the sharp
featured man and his pregnant wife on the left and the more distant figures of older women, so
familiar in le Brocquy’s drawings from this period, on the right. Alistair Smith has pointed to the
influence of Synthetic Cubism on le Brocquy’s paintings of the 1950s. It is made evident here
in his muted watercolour washes, while the intensity of the work is carried through the restless,
spontaneous line, sometimes sharp and angular, sometimes flowing or concentrated in untidy
patches of cross hatching, to give a sense of the bustle and vibrancy of the Tinker’s camp.
Catherine Marshall
November 2014
€5,000 - 7,000