ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 24th September 2025

20 6 EDWARD MCGUIRE RHA (1932-1986) Barn Owl (1983) Oil on board, 46 x 61cm (18 x 24’’) Signed with initials and dated 1983 Provenance: With Taylor Galleries, Dublin, label verso; With Jorgensen Fine Art, Dublin, label verso € 15,000 - 20,000 By his own account, Edward McGuire’s interest in owls and other birds began when he was about 20. He happened to meet an elderly taxidermist who worked for the Natural History Museum, a Mr Williams. He explained his craft to the fascinated young McGuire, and sold him three unmounted birds, including the owl, which he later had mounted. In his book on the painter, Brian Fallon quotes him from a piece in Image magazine decades later: “Owl…is my favourite sitter, my friend.” So it’s fair to see his owl paintings as in a sense symbolic self-por- traits: the artist as an intent observer. That is certainly an apt description of McGuire, who preferred to work in an orderly, labora- tory-like studio, often to the accompaniment of recorded music, mostly jazz. He evolved his own singular working method, building each painting with incremental exactitude. He wasn’t interested in transient atmospheric effects but in the concrete facts before him. Yet he was more than a realist per se, because his technique was exceptional. Over many years, he developed a personal colour dictionary. Now in the collection of IMMA, this remarkable object could be described as an encyclopaedia of colour mixtures. The extraordinary, jewel-like intensity of his paintings derives from the fact that he never simply toned down a colour by the addition of black or grey. Every bit of the surface is a carefully calculated mixture of colours, so that even the darkest hues have a noticeable vibrancy and, overall, each painting has a glittering, hyper-real quality. A son of the charismatic businessman, sports- man and senator of the same name, who was also the owner of Brown Thomas, McGuire was himself a capable athlete despite poor health in childhood. The family business beckoned but, when his father took him to Italy, he was bowled over by the painters of the Florentine Renaissance, an experience that set him on his own artistic path. His portrait of Garech Browne, exhibited at the RHA Annual Exhibition in 1970, marked his arrival as a formidable artis- tic talent, and he became, as Brian Fallon wrote “the finest Irish portrait painter of his genera- tion.” While his portraits of poets and writers are particularly outstanding, his painstaking technique meant that he was never prolific but ensured that the quality of his work is excep- tionally high. His favoured owl has a distinguished icono- graphic role in classical Western art. It has long been associated with the virtuous and benign Greek goddess Pallas Athena - Minerva in Roman mythology. It is often to be found in paintings of her, perhaps atop a stack of books, symbolising her wisdom. Its uncanny stillness and its impassive, watchful gaze remind us of its mastery of the domain of night, sleep and dreams. Aidan Dunne, August 2025