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7 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Fan Tailed Pigeons (528)Oil on canvas, 38 x 46cm (15 x 18’’)
Signed and dated 1985 verso and inscribed on stretcher ‘
528, Fan Tailed Pigeons 1985
’
Provenance: From the Collection of the late Gillian Bowler.
Exhibited: The Taylor Gallery, Dublin (label verso)
For someone who devoted so much of his career to representations of humans, either as travellers,
mythical warriors, or studies of individual or generic presences, Louis le Brocquy was a particularly
fine interpreter of animals and birds. Some of his most powerful paintings were of Irish Travellers
in the 1940s and it is in his depictions of their lives that we find his first images of animals and birds.
One of these,
‘Tinker Group’
, a 1947 watercolour shown in ‘
Louis le Brocquy; Allegory and Legend’
,
at the Hunt Museum in 2006, has as its shocking central motif a traveller woman dangling a mouse
by the tail, to be followed a year later by ‘
Man Creating Bird’
shown in the same exhibition. Later he
based one of his most important early tapestries, ‘
The Garlanded Goat’,
1949, on the goat at Puck Fair
in Killorglin and later still, in 1969, he produced one of the most powerful birds in Irish visual culture -
the Morrigan, as part of his illustrations to Thomas Kinsella’s translation of ‘
The Táin’
legend.
With the possible exception of the mouse, all of these portrayals of the bird and animal kingdom are
symbolic, they represent remnants of a pagan culture, of beauty and creativity, and of the heroic.
What they share is le Brocquy’s acute observation of the creatures’ salient features and an effortless
ability to transmit their animal outrage, terror or sense of self-worth in paint.
The dove, is widely recognised as a symbol of peace. Picasso is one of many artists who have painted
it for this reason and having lived through two devastating world wars and decades of strife in
Northern Ireland, it might be expected that Le Brocquy’s doves would also carry this symbolic weight.
However, his
‘Fan-tailed Pigeons’
are too caught up in the flurry of their mating rituals to embody
anything else. Instead the painting seems to belong, like his occasional still life paintings, to those
moments when the artist relaxed and painted the things closest to him simply for the pleasure of it.
The white, blue-grey palette, so familiar from his head paintings, is enlivened here by the vigour of the
brushwork.
Catherine Marshall, April 2017
€ 40,000 - 60,000