Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 8th December 2021

86 Yet there are also clear differences between the two painters. For instance, Swift was uninterested in the kind of meticulous draughtsmanship that characterised Freud’s work at this time, his obsessive attention to detail, the texture of fabric and hair in particular. On the contrary, Swift’s portraits from this period often include elements and flourishes that suggest more abstract interests. In the portrait of Freud, the background – a grid of window- panes and hard and soft window blinds – becomes an arrangement of repeated rectilinear forms. This treatment of the background is reminiscent of his portrait of Anthony Cronin, except here the sitter is off-centre, allowing for a more extensive and striking formal arrangement. The right-hand panel of the canvas in particular is clearly de- marcated from the representational frame of the portrait, with a number of apparently abstract forms intersect- ing, at various angles, giving the effect of a contained exercise in Cubism – a mode Swift occasionally employed as a sort of foil within his predominantly realist compositions. That said, great care has been taken to realistically render the filtering of light through the blinds behind the sit- ter, and the two tumblers on the table before him. The distinctive wrought-iron railings of the Hatch Street studio window also feature, as does a tall house-plant – a botanical motif that recurs across both Freud’s and Swift’s work. Swift’s interest in foliage would eventually lead him away from the dark psychological atmosphere that suffuses his early work (and arguably away from Freud’s strong initial influence) toward a looser, more profuse, even expressionistic style, painting landscapes and outdoor subjects as well as the portraits and still lifes that predominated in the early 1950s. Swift’s portrait of Freud thus represents a singular record of the encounter between these two artists. They did maintain contact beyond their initial Hatch Street exchange, and Swift would include reproductions of some of Freud’s work in the final issue of X, A Quarterly Review, the periodical he founded and ran (with David Wright) from 1959–62. Swift was an artist who also wrote, and he published several important pieces of his own commen- tary on painting and literature in the magazine, as well as work by a range of Irish, British, and European writers – including Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, and Malcolm Lowry – alongside reproductions of mostly figurative painters, including Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and David Bomberg. In 1962, following a visit, Swift and his wife decided to move to the Algarve, where they set up Porches Pottery. He rarely exhibited his work thereafter. It was not until 1993, ten years after his death, that a major retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art revived critical and popular interest in his work. In his contribution to the catalogue for that exhibition, Anthony Cronin attested that Swift ‘was never in any doubt that painting was a re-creation of what the painter saw … what he was actually looking at during the act of painting. A faithfulness of this sort was part of the bargain, part of his contract with his art. In conversation he – we – associated this faith- fulness, this “truth” which might be possible in painting with an equivalent truth or honesty to experience which might be possible in literature.’ This conviction perhaps goes some way to explaining the editorial logic of X, with its curious configuration of artists and writers, practitioners of an art that was, in Cronin’s words, ‘ frugal, ascetic, puritanical’. (2) Nathan O’Donnell, October 2021 (1) G.H.G. [Tony Gray], ‘Young Artist of Promise’, Irish Times, 3 October 1952, 5. (2) Anthony Cronin, ‘Patrick Swift in His Time’, Patrick Swift, exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1993.