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Louis le Brocquy HRHA ( 1916 - 2012)
Study for a Head of Keats, 1968
Oil on linen, 40.5 x 33 cm (16 x 13”)
Signed and dated, original exhibition label verso, artist’s reference 206
Exhibited: “Louis le Brocquy” Exhibition Gimpel Fils Gallery London 1968, Cat. No. 19; “Louis le
Brocquy” Exhibition Gimpel- Hanover Galerie, Zurich 1969.
Louis le Brocquy began his study of Celtic heads which morphed into his well-known individual
head studies during the mid-1960s. At this time too, he began his occasional studies of the head
of James Joyce, followed in the 1970s by various series of similar ‘portraits’ of other Irish writers
such as W.B.Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. His work on other European writers
and artists is less widely known, but they include images of William Shakespeare, John Keats,
Federico Garcia Lorca, Rene Descartes, the painters Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon and the
Irish patriot, Wolfe Tone.
In contrast to his watercolours and drawings, le Brocquy’s oil paintings, in particular, his many
images or ‘
Studies towards an Image of…
,’ Yeats or Joyce or whoever the subject happened to be,
were never spontaneously executed. Instead their very titles, as much as the extraordinary number
of images of each subject that he worked on, indicate how considered and reflective his approach
to these portrait heads was. He told the critic Michael Peppiat ‘I think of the painter as a kind
of archaeologist, an archaeologist of the spirit, patiently disturbing the surface of things until he
makes a discovery which will enable him to take his search further’.
Little has been written about his engagement with the head of John Keats, the romantic poet,
but it is significant that his friend Francis Bacon, had been commissioned to paint a portrait of
Keats’s older contemporary and fellow poet, William Blake a decade earlier, and that Bacon too
had painted a number of portraits as he sought to discover the essence of the poet. Like Bacon in
that instance, le Brocquy had to resort to the poet’s death mask and the few portraits which had
been executed in his lifetime to get some insight in Keats’s physical appearance. This contrasts
with his later images of Irish writers where the challenge was to find the defining presence behind
the many photographs that existed of them.
Catherine Marshall
November 2014
€10,000 - 15,000