Adams Important Irish Art 27th May 2015 : Large Image & Place Bid Click Lot Title.

Oil on Whatman paper, 78x57 cm (30.75x22.5”)

Signed and dated 1964

Provenance: The Basil Goulding Collection

Exhibited: IELA 1964, cat. no. 40 where purchased.

“Two Painters from the Collection of Sir Basil Goulding”, Ulster Museum, Belfast, Jan/Feb 1965, cat. no.51

“2 Deeply: One Hundred Paintings by Barrie Cooke and Camille Souter”, The Carroll Building, August 1971, cat. no. 33

“Camille Souter” Exhibition, YMCA, Wexford, Oct./Nov. 1972, cat. no. 31

“Camille Souter Retrospective”, Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo

Literature: “Camille Souter: The Mirror in the Sea” by Garrett Cormican, 2006, cat. no. 203, illustrated p.260

In 1930 Souter came to Ireland where she attended Glengara Park School, Dun Laoghaire where she attained honours in art. In 1948 she

studied nursing at Guy’s Hospital, London. During this period she became ill with tuberculosis, and whilst recuperating in the Isle of Wight

she began painting again. It was the illness which led her to be called Camille. She gave up nursing for painting. In 1951 she married

Gordon Souter. During the 1950s she travelled through Italy and continued to paint. She came back to Dublin but returned intermittently

to Italy. She began to exhibit in Dublin in the late 1950s and since then her work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions. In 1960

she married again and settled in Calary Bog in 1962. She now lives and works in Dublin but spends much of her time on Achill Island.

Who better than Sir Basil Goulding, Camille Souter’s biggest patron, to give us an insight into the artist? Goulding wrote a short personal

piece on each artist that he chose to include in the 1961 Exhibition ‘’One Man’s Meat’’, which featured Souter on the cover which is worth

reprinting here over 50 years later :- ‘’Camille Souter is a painter of the most rotund delicacy. It must be very rare for an artist to possess or

attain to - and in this case they seem to coincide - powers of unfailing sensitivity as transmitted by techniques of unfailing discrimination

- and all without much popular notice. One way of verifying a statement of this extremity is to see the artist’s whole stock of paintings: if

almost none are exceptions, and they only partial, one may speak. It is intriguing, by the way, to notice how inadequate materials, brown

paper, newspaper, spirt -aluminium, printers ink, bicycle enamel, etc in these few pictures - are powerless to inhibit surely evocative artist-

ry’’. Goulding continued collecting Souter’s work, including this one and by 1965 he lent 56 of her works to the “Two painters” exhibition.

€15,000 - €20,000