ADAM'S - Important Irish Art Auction - 31st May 2017 (Click Lot title for more images and to Place Bid)

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186
Watercolour, 50 x 60cm (19¾ x 23½’’)
Signed
Provenance: From the Collection of the late
Gillian Bowler.
Exhibited: ‘T.P. Flanagan Exhibition’,
the Hendriks Gallery, October/November
1985, Catalogue No.21 (measurements
incorrect in catalogue), where purchased.
€ 400 - 600
Oil on canvas, 112 x 106cm (44 x 41¾’’)
Signed
Provenance: From the Collection of the late Gillian Bowler.
Exhibited: “T.P. Flanaghan RHA PRUA 25 Years with the Hendriks Gallery”, Hendriks Gallery Dublin, June 1987, where purchased;
“T. P. Flanagan, Retrospective”, Ulster Museum, Belfast; Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin; Fermanagh
County Museum, Enniskillen, Catalogue No.84 in each case.
Literature: T. P. Flanagan, Retrospective, Belfast, Dublin and Enniskillen by Dr SB Kennedy, picture illustrated on front cover;
T. P. Flanagan: Painter of Light and Landscape, London, Lund Humphries, 2013, reproduced in colour pp. 130, 131.
The composition is important in Flanagan’s work for it confirms the movement towards a calligraphic technique that came to
dominate his painting. This was a development Aidan Dunne noted in the Sunday Tribune (14 June 1987): ‘Flanagan is a superb
technician’, he said, ‘a shadow boxer of a painter whose ghostly images find their way on to the surface in a fusillade of jabs and
darts. The calligraphic maze of brushstrokes continually threatens to collapse into abstraction, but it is invariably rescued by the
painter’s strong, instinctive grasp of his subject, a kind of privileged link with the landscape described’. His ‘problem,’ said Ciaran
Carty in the same issue of the paper ‘is that [he] can never paint a thing at the time. [He’s] got to let it lie in the imagination and
marinate’. Recalling Flanagan’s childhood memories of travelling by train from Enniskillen to Sligo, Carty said that he had ‘loved
the sensation of momentarily seeing something from the window only for it to pass out of vision never to be seen again’. Brian
Fallon also praised the exhibition in the Irish Times (6 June1987), although he had reservations about the artist’s developing
style. ‘Flanagan’s early style’, he said, ‘was refined, understated and spare, almost Oriental’, but he had moved away from it in the
last decade to become ‘lusher, prettier and also more conventional’. Nevertheless, he said, many works ‘stand well above that
level’. To Dorothy Walker, in the Independent (12 June 1987), the artist’s ‘light fluid style’ was ‘immediately recognizable, and she
thought there was ‘more substance than usual in the oil paintings, almost a sense of urgency in the familiar rapid brush strokes’.
The subject of the picture is Lower Lough Erne near Portora Royal School.
Dr S B Kennedy May 2017
€ 5,000 - 7,000
The Gi l l i an Bowl er Co l l ec t i on