Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 27 SEPTEMBER 2023

14 4 WILLIAM CROZIER HRHA (1930 - 2011) Luxurious Garden Gouache on paper, 58 x 82cm (23 x 32½”) Signed Provenance: With The Scottish Gallery, label verso € 6,000 - 8,000 From the early 1980s, WilliamCrozier and his wife Kath- erine Crouan established a base in West Cork. London gallerist Angela Flowers was the vital link. She’d had a house in Rosscarbery for many years. They visited her there and when she launched a gallery offshoot her house, Flowers West, in 1985, she began with a solo show by Crozier. He and Katherine gradually spent more and more time in West Cork. He was inspired by the distinctive landscape, and he was exceptional in highlighting the unexpectedly bold, intense bursts of colour produced by displays of seasonal blooms, in- cluding montbretia and fuchsia, fields of crops and the glittering, shifting light reflected and enhanced by the water. It was all ideally suited to his gift for pictorial organisation, a gift sharpened by his time designing and painting theatre sets in 1950s Dublin. Born in Yoker, Glasgow to parents from Antrim, Cro- zier attached great importance to his Irish connec- tions, though rather than encouraging a sense of Irish - or Scottish - identity, it set him firmly against insular notions of identity, and he saw himself as a European. After studying art in Glasgow he spent time in Paris and relished the bohemian, intellectual life of the Left Bank. Anthony Cronin became a good friend in Dublin and they spent time in Spain, another artistically form- ative experience. He found great success in London, though he seems eventually to have tired of a trend in his work towards expressive figuration. Without doubt, the connection with nature in Ireland revitalised his painting and printmaking, and the Irish art public, enraptured with his innovative take on the Irish land- scape, took him to their hearts. The liveliness, sinuous patterning and buoyant colour of this “luxurious” Irish garden clearly evidence the delight he took in his new- ly discovered surroundings. Aidan Dunne, August 2023