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

Watercolours, each 59 x 45cm (23¼ x 17¾’’)

Framed as one, one signed with initials and dated (19)’82

Provenance: From the Collection of the late Gillian Bowler.

Louis le Brocquy began what was to be a major theme in his work, his portraits of James Joyce in the early 1960s

alongside his first explorations of ancestral heads. While his studies and reconstructions of the heads of famous

people from Shakespeare and Descartes to well-known Irish writers such as W.B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Sea-

mus Heaney were, at least in part, prompted by a commission in the 1970s to paint a Nobel Prize Winner, the James

Joyce images appear to have sprung from the artist’s personal fascination with the celebrated author of

Ulysses

Over the following two decades he produced over 120 studies of Joyce in various media, although mainly in oil on

canvas. “And in a sense I could have kept on indefinitely”, he told Michael Peppiatt “because I never felt there was

anything definite or conclusive about them. I think Joyce’s own work was rather like that, cyclic rather than linear,

ending as it began, a circle to be entered at any point. It was the product of a remarkably Celtic mind, a Counter-Re-

naissance mind in a sense and perhaps comparable in its constant circularity, to the interlacings of the Book of

Kells.”

(1)

The first 70 or so of these heads were exhibited at Gimpel Flils in London and later at the Hugh Lane Municipal

Gallery in Dublin in 1978/79, but the watercolour images here belong to the early 1980s, proof positive that le

Brocquy’s interest in Joyce came from an abiding determination to fully comprehend the mind of the writer. The two

images are quite different, that on the left showing the face in what was, for Le Brocquy, quite sharp definition. It

speaks of the stern, even steely personality that drove Joyce to labour for so many years over two major, tradi-

tion-shattering novels, while the other is more remote and nebulous, - less readable, more in tune with Le Brocquy’s

sense that there was something ‘Celtic and Counter-Renaissance’ about him. The artist regularly referred to the

writing of the physicist, Erwin Shrodinger, whom he met in Dublin in the late 1940s and who had an important influ-

ence on his own thought. Schrodinger was interested in the relationship between the particular and the universal,

between consciousness and matter. It is interesting to speculate if Le Brocquy intended these two images of James

Joyce to be framed together as a means of connecting Schrodinger’s ideas with the writer.

These watercolour studies also relate to le Brocquy’s classification system for his head paintings, that on the left

hovering between being a ‘reconstructed’ and an ‘occluded’ head while the more obscure image on the right be-

longs to the group the artist described as ‘evoked’ as if it had emerged, without external stimulus from the depths

of his memory or his contemplation of the writer’s work.

Catherine Marshall, April 2017

(1) Peppiatt, Michael interview with Louis le Brocquy, 1979, reprinted in

Louis le Brocquy - The Head Image

, Kinsale, 1978.

€ 20,000 - 30,000