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LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012)
Study for Anne with Images
Oil on canvas, 73 x 116cm
Signed and dated 1968 on canvas verso. Inscribed with title and numbered opus No.202 on stretcher verso.
Provenance: with the Dawson Gallery.
Exhibited:
“Louis le Brocquy - Recent Paintings” Exhibition, Gimpel Fils London Oct 1968 and travelled to Gimpel and
Hanover Galerie, Zurich the following January. Later returned to The Dawson Gallery Dublin where sold.
1968, the year in which he painted
Anne with Images
, was a busy one for Louis le Brocquy. In that year he was complet-
ing his now famous, illustrations to Thomas Kinsella’s new translation of the Gaelic hero tale,
The Tain
, the prints for
which were to be shown a year later in a solo exhibition at the Dawson Gallery, Dublin. But he was also developing his
series of heads - ancestral heads, and heads of Irish heroes and writers, which were to dominate his practice for the
next two decades.
Anne with Images
can be identified as
Study for Anne with Images
, which he showed at his exhibition at the Gimpel Fils
Gallery, London, October 1 -26, 1968, and at Gimpel and Hanover Galerie, Zurich, the following January (See Louis le
Brocquy, Recent Paintings, catalogue, no 15, artist’s ref. no. 202 Gimpel Fils, 1968,).
Le Brocquy’s interest in the head is generally said to have begun when he saw a collection of Polynesian heads at the
Musée de L’Homme in Paris in the early 1960s and was cemented by his knowledge of Celtic stone carving in Ireland
and other Celtic-Ligurian heads that he saw in Entremont and Roquepertuse in southern France in 1965. However his
first head studies were of a different kind. As a young artist, Le Brocquy had been commissioned to make drawings
of the human brain, in particular the pituitary gland, by a Dublin surgeon Adam McConnell. The horrific events of the
Second World War temporarily blotted out that line of research in favour of more socially committed art dealing with
travellers and other marginalised groups, but a meeting with Erwin Shrodinger led him to explore the connection
between matter and consciousness, the universal and the particular, and re-awakened his search for universal human
essence as manifested in the individual.
Le Brocquy developed a very personal classification system for his head paintings, they could be ‘reconstructed’ as in ar-
chaeological practices, ‘occluded’ as if hidden by time or other agencies or ‘evoked’, in which they appear to be prompt-
ed by a purely spiritual and imaginative stimulus. Generally the heads float in isolation against a pale ground.
Study
for Anne with Images
is unusual in that the head is not the only figurative presence ‘evoked’ on the canvas although it is
not possible to discern what the images represent. Instead the unusually active background, in shades of deep brown,
interrupted by flashes of light, seems alive with imaginative possibility and may be a reference to the artistic work of
the sitter, his wife, the painter Anne Madden. The use of colour and the treatment of the background here connect this
work to another painting of the same year,
Stele: Hommage à Entremont
(Fondation Maeght, St. Paul).
Catherine Marshall
€ 8,000 - 12,000