ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 25 MARCH 2026

40 25 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Study After Manet (1984) Oil on canvas 22 x 27cm (8½ x 10 ½”) Signed with initials indistinctly, top right; also signed and dated (19)’84 verso, also signed, inscribed with title and dated 1984 on stretcher. Artist’s oeuvre number 493. Provenance: Sale, Sotheby’s London, 17/11/2004, lot 117; sale, DeVeres, Dublin, 12/4/2005, lot 50; Private collection, Ireland. € 10,000 - 15,000 While staying in his French home in Les Combes in the 1980s Le Brocquy began to work on a series of paintings of pigeons. The house was a 19th century villa which they had bought in the 1960s, set within olive groves in the foothills of the Alps where he built a studio there for both he and Anne to use. This work dates from 1984 and sees him work on a comparable smaller scale. While the pigeon paintings were more focused on capturing their lively, fluttering move- ments, in both subject matters, we can see how they were exercises in the act of observation, becoming compositions that Le Brocquy repeatedly returned to. Manet loved the subject of still life, attaching great importance to it remarking that it was ‘touchstone of the painter’ and they represent almost one fifth of his artistic production. While from the title of the picture, Le Brocquy does not reference a specific work of Manet, it is most likely the 1864 painting entitled Branche de Pivoines Blanches et Sécateur (Branch of White Peonies and Pruning Shears , Musée d’Orsay). Le Brocquy made another work in the same year entitled Manet’s Peonies (Private Collection) whose composition and palette are almost identical to the present example and carries the artists’ oeuvre number of 494. The seeds of the idea for these paintings began for Le Brocquy back in the 1950s and 60s and when he revisited the theme in the 1980s, the works seem to return to the more fundamental elements of painting and we witness his virtuoso handling of the medium. In this work there is a mass of white strokes applied in quick varying directions suggestive of the freshly cut flowers, their petals heavy with scent. In looking at this work one cannot also help thinking of the cubist still lives by Braque and Picasso, with all the contours split open, shifting perspectives occurring simulta- neously, the objects constantly in motion, echoes of past movements on the ultimately fixed two dimen- sional surface. The roots of Modernism in the visual arts are often traced back to Manet and he was an important figure for Picasso, who made around forty works which were inspired by Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe . Le Brocquy’s paintings of this period sing with vitality and life, they return to the simple state of being and offered him, as he remarked at the time, ‘a tempo- rary release from the heads and their rather intense reflective consciousness, their tragic aspect’ (Louis le Brocquy, in an interview with Ann Cremin, Paris, 1984, quoted in ‘Louis le Brocquy Paintings 1939 -1996 ’, Irish Museum of Modern Art, p.88.). Here he could focus on the all the possibilities of the flowers’ natural form, how they occupy space, becoming simultane- ously the object observed and physical volume of the composition. Niamh Corcoran, March 2026