Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 30TH MARCH 2022

100 80 PATRICK SWIFT (1927-1983) Monte Gordo Oil on canvas, 148 x 168cm (58¼ x 66’’) Exhibited: Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1993, cat. no. 52. € 15,000 - 20,000 In 1962, following a visit to Portugal, Swift and his wife Oonagh decided to move to the Al- garve, where, with Portuguese artist Lima de Freitas, they set up Porches Pottery, a work- shop dedicated to the production of hand-painted clay pottery, and to the revival of a local craft tradition that was, by the 1960s, in decline. Swift rarely exhibited thereafter, but continued to practice as a painter, and Monte Gordo is a good demonstration of the increasing lightness and fluidity of his later work. There is a brightness and warmth to this large-scale Algarve landscape that is unlike anything in his earlier, far more constricted and muted approaches to the natural world. A profuse wood- ed area, seen from above, occupies the lower half of the canvas; this playful foreground of swirling globe-like forms gives way to a more manicured garden in the upper part of the composition, surrounding a low-lying villa on top of the hill. There is a rhythmic, intu- itive, sensuous quality to the brushwork in Swift’s later work which might have something to do with his newly-acquired knowledge and skill in relation to hand-painted ceramics. At the same time, there is a simple monumentality to Monte Gordo that perhaps echoes Cézanne’s treatment of Mont Sainte-Victoire and the landscape of Aix-en-Provence; cer- tainly Swift felt a similarly intense and resonant connection to the landscapes of the Al- garve, a connection that invigorated and transformed his late work. Monte Gordo was included in the major retrospective of Swift’s work at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1993, ten years after his death, which prompted a revival of interest in Swift and a new assessment of his practice, and legacy, beyond the better-known early work of the 1950s. Nathan O’Donnell. February 2022