ADAM'S - IMPORTANT IRISH ART, WEDNESDAY 29TH MARCH 2017 (Click Lot title for more images and to Place Bid)

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Oil on board, 84 x 121.5cm (33 x 48’’)
Signed and dated 1960
Exhibited: ‘Painting and Sculpture by Ulster Artists’, CEMA
Gallery, Belfast, Spring 1960;
‘Paintings by T. P. Flanagan’, Hendriks Gallery, Dublin March
1964, Catalogue No.14.
€ 5,000 - 7,000
At the time this painting was painted, T. P. Flanagan was painting often in watercolours - he is generally regarded as the finest watercolourist of his gen-
eration working in Ireland - as can be seen clearly from his handling of oils in ‘The Long Avenue, Lissadell’. As a child he had often holidayed at Lissadell,
with his aunts - he was virtually brought up by two maiden aunts - and thus he spent the ‘long’ summer holidays at Lissadell, where he had the run of
the garden as well as the great library. It was in the library at Lissadell that W. B. Yeats’ epic poem, ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz’,
written in 1927, with its famous lines, ‘The light of evening, Lissadell, / Great windows open to the south, / Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one
a gazelle…’ celebrates the House and is a threnody to a past age. Here, Flanagan’s aunt Elizabeth, who was a lacemaker, ran a school of needlework
and lacemaking, while his other aunt, Katy, had a cottage nearby. Is it any wonder that their nephew would amuse himself in the house, browsing in
its fine library - it is little wonder that he developed a literary turn of mind - and playing in the woods which he came to know intimately. Even as a
child Flanagan admired Lissadell as a working estate (some three thousand acres) and was particularly impressed by the trees - sycamores, pines (of
which he ‘liked the contours’ against the sky - something that he would dwell on in his art later) and others, things that would later play a dominant
role in his paintings. Often, too, he bathed in the sea at the ‘water wall’ on the edge of the estate and it was near there that he painted one of his first
watercolours, ‘Lissadell Shore’, in 1945. Overall, as he recalled, Lissadell ‘had an enormous effect on him’; it set, he said, his ‘visual parameters’ and also
stimulated his writing of poetry that dominated much of his early thinking.(1)
‘The Long Avenue, Lissadell’, epitomizes all this. Here the avenue is shown leading the eye back into the picture towards the sea, the recession of which
is halted by the area of dark paint in the distance and the trees to the right which are shown en masse. It is a view that Flanagan painted on numerous
occasions in these years and later, for he was greatly drawn to the house itself. But it is the watercolourist’s use of glazes’, especially in the sky and the
foreground, that holds one’s attention as well as the similar treatment in the massing of the trees.
(1) Flanagan, conversation with the author, 24 July 2008. Flanagan’s early poems remain unpublished, being largely juvenilia. Poems such as ‘On Arney
Bridge’, ‘The Tale of Swans’ and ‘Lament for The Red-haired’, all written around 1945, are typical examples and they are concerned principally with
romance, love and the landscape. They do, however, illustrate his early interests and involve issues that would later dominate much of his painting.
Dr S.B. Kennedy March 2017