Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

18 7 * EDWARD MCGUIRE RHA (1932-1986) Michael Longley Oil on board, 40.5 x 30.5 (16” x 12”) Signed with initials; signed, inscribed and dated 1983 verso Provenance: Taylor Galleries Label verso € 6,000 - 10,000 Painted in 1983, this is forty-four-year old poet Michael Longley and, unusually, for an Edward McGuire portrait, the focus in entirely on the figure. McGuire almost always in- cluded a background that featured windows, doors, shelves, foliage, birds but the background in this instance is a muted abstract mixture of brown and grey and blue. Longley’s brown shirt and trousers and dark navy-blue jacket suggest a sombre tone. A neatly-combed and bearded Longley looks over the viewer’s left shoulder with an expression that is both calm and serious. This portrait of a contemplative, relaxed but alert poet was greatly appreciated by the sitter and in a letter written on Christmas Day, 1990, Longley wrote to Sally McGuire, McGuire’s widow, to say how he appreciates ‘more and more that I am one of his subjects’ adding that McGuire was ‘a superb painter and interpreter of human personality: a great man’. He also noted that ‘Eddie painted my eyes blue instead of brown! And in a couple of boozy phone calls refused to ad- mit the mistake – though, sober, he promised to rectify the error. Now, I wouldn’t want the picture any other way – the only portrait is one in which I have blue eyes!’ Longley in a poem called ‘Sitting for Eddie in memory of Edward McGuire’ tells us that he had suggested ‘a spray of beech leaves’ or ‘a frieze of birds’ or ‘a single carline-thistle’ for background but none of them made it into the painting. During the sittings Longley listened to jazz and watched ‘in an enormous magnifying/ Glass our eyes out of all propor- tion’: an artist looking at a poet; a poet looking at an artist. That McGuire got the eye colour wrong, and never changed it, is intriguing. Niall MacMonagle April 2022