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

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78
Oil on panel, 60 x 120cm (23½ x 47¼’’)
Signed lower left; inscribed with title verso
Provenance: From the Collection of The Dubliners’ singer, the late Luke Kelly, and acquired by Gillian Bowler from the singer’s
partner, Madeleine Seiler, who was then a neighbour on Dartmouth Square. It is thought that Luke Kelly acquired
the work from his friend, Paddy Collins directly, so this is the first public viewing of this important work.
Patrick Collins once described Paul Henry, whom he greatly admired, as a ‘modest man who painted Ireland like an Irishman’.
Collins himself came to be prominently identified as someone who painted Ireland, its land and less frequently, its people, like an
Irishman. He had a keen sense of mission to identify some kind of essential qualities of ‘Irishness’ or ‘Celticness’ and to express
that in a visual language that was distinctive and recognisable. The writer Brian Fallon thought of him as having been ‘wholly
original from the start’ (1), a view that Fallon held despite him and others regularly asserting that Collins was the Sligo inheritor of
Jack B. Yeats’ legacy.
What Fallon and others, especially Collins’ biographer, Frances Ruane, particularly admired was the artist’s ability to combine a
sense of that Irishness with modernism at a time when those two qualities appeared almost contradictory.
Collins is best known for his dreamy, nearly monochrome landscapes, which are usually bathed in soft grey light. The figurative
elements in these landscapes, traveller families, animals, birds, the occasional church spire or ancient stones, hover out of mists
of paint as if time has blended them with the overall atmosphere of the country. Yet Collins also painted the female nude, and
was one of the first Irish artists to popularize the genre in his own country. Not only that, his early gestures in this field reveal an
element of defiance in the face of Ireland’s Catholic prudishness in the 1960s. Thus Nude 1, from the Basil Goulding collection
in the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, shows the figure peeling off the last of her clothes for the artist, as if to say, it is the duty of art to
reveal all. The figure is outlined more boldly than is typical in Collins’ work but is set into his trademark blue-grey, halo like ground.
The Bath, is relatively unusual however, not in the use of the nude, but in its open homage to the work of Pierre Bonnard, and in
particular Bonnard’s Nude in the Bath, 1937 in the Petit Palais, Paris, which Collins would have seen when he lived in France in the
1970s. In making his own of Bonnard’s composition however, Collins typically reduced the palette, so that the nude is scarcely
distinguished from the surrounding bath, the shape of which enables his penchant for a soft ‘frame within a frame’. The pose of
the figure is given more energy in Collins’ version, more upright, than Bonnard’s supine image. The Bath, was one of the first paint-
ings Collins executed after his arrival in France, from where he continued to send pictures for exhibition to the Richie Hendriks
Gallery, Dublin. It was purchased by the singer Luke Kelly of the Dubliners, and acquired from his partner Madeleine Seiler after
the singer’s death in 1984.
Collins was one of the first artists to be given a solo exhibition at Dublin’s Hendriks Gallery. It was he who introduced fellow paint-
er Barrie Cooke to the gallery where both men regularly exhibited throughout the 1960s and ‘70s. Despite an irregular output,
perhaps related to his bohemian lifestyle, Collins continued to be highly regarded. He was selected to represent Ireland at the
Guggenheim Awards in 1958. He was elected honorary RHA in 1982 and became Saoi of Aosdana in 1987.
‘Patrick Collins, Through Sligo Eyes’, formed part of the RTE Art Lives series, screened March 10, 2009.
Catherine Marshall, April 2017
(1) Brian Fallon, ‘Patrick Collins; A Modern Celt’, Irish Arts Review, Spring, 2009.
€ 20,000 - 30,000