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Camille Souter HRHA (b.1929)
End of Summer Apples
Oil on paper laid on board, 21 X 32cm (8¼ x 12½”)
Signed bottom right
Provenace: ‘Important Irish Art’ Sale these rooms September 2002, Lot 14 where purchased by current owner.
Literature: Garrett Cormican, Camille Souter,The Mirror in the Sea (Dublin 2006) p 283, Cat. No 310.
End of Summer Apples
is one of many still life subjects painted by Camille Souter, during the 1960s and 70s.
Growing vegetables and fruit is very much in keeping with her strongly felt rapport with the earth and her
concern for its sustainability, a concern that can be followed through her career, and is manifested in paintings
of crop harvests in Italy in the 1950s, weather effects in Wicklow and Achill throughout her life and most
recently in her eighties, in her exploration of geological processes in Iceland. A keen gardener, she sees vege-
tation as a vital natural product of the earth and is irritated when it is used for mere decoration in contexts that
undermine that role, such as old boats filled with flowers and hanging baskets. She grew vegetables and fruits
for food delaying the journey from the garden to the table, so that she could paint them first. Her daughter
Gino, told Garret Cormican, Souter’s biographer, that the family ‘couldn’t touch cooking apples until they had
been painted’. The luminous greens of
End of Summer Apples
is as much a celebration of the fertility of the
earth and her delight at the autumn harvest, as it is a vehicle for paint.
This painting was executed soon after Souter had seen and been excited by the paintings of the French
painter Pierre Bonnard. Like him she applies her paint in thin, vibrant glazes, rejecting the vogue for thicker
expressionist passages and achieving a sense of depth and richness through scumbles and pointillist marks.
Her preferred medium is paper and unlike most painters, Souter does not use an easel, preferring to work on
a table top. She works with natural light only and insists that her paintings should be seen in daylight.That is
particularly appropriate for
End of Summer Apples
where the brilliant light effects can be best enjoyed.
Souter is a Saoi of Aosdána, the first female visual artist to be so honoured and in another first, she won the
Glen Dimplex Award for a sustained contribution to Irish art, the only woman artist to do so.
Catherine Marshall
November 2014
€8000 - 12,000