ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 25 MARCH 2026

42 26 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Study towards an image of Shakespeare (1983) Watercolour and crayon, 52.5 x 42cm (20½ x 16½’’) Signed with initials and dated (19)’83 Archive no. W717 € 12,000 - 18,000 Although he did also paint individual figurative subjects, during the early part of his career Louis le Brocquy was notably interested in the dynamics of family and social groups. Then, especially from the mid-1950s, he began to focus increasingly on the question of how to visualise the phenomenon of the individual human consciousness in all its interior complexity. This prototypical human being he termed a Presence . He has recounted how, on a visit to Spain, he was struck by the way the brilliant sunshine seemed to dissolve the human figures pass- ing before a whitewashed wall. It seemed to him a striking means of conveying the sense of the human presence, half real, half ethereal, conjured from a ground of time and space. When, early the following decade, he visited the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, he encountered a col- lection of Polynesian painted skulls, and linked them in his mind to the Celtic notion of the skull as a magic box enshrining the spirit. He was ready to embark on what became his primary subject for the rest of his life: the re-imagined, reconstituted portraits of our antecedents. In these feats of imaginative archaeol- ogy, he concentrated on his own ancestors and then on several cultural figures sharing his Dublin back- ground, including James Joyce, gradually moving further afield. Gallerist Jean-François Jaeger sug- gested he should attempt the great English drama- tist. Originally le Brocquy resisted, but found himself drawn to the subject. He was aware that there was no extant, reliable likeness of Shakespeare. That was a challenge, but also suited his practice of proposing multiple tries at an image, rather than claiming to achieve one, definitive portrait. The critic for Le Figa- ro acclaimed his first efforts as “extraordinary” and bringing a sense of living vitality to the dramatist. Born in Dublin in 1916, Louis le Brocquy grew up to become one of the leading Irish artists of the 20th century. His love of painting triumphed over expec- tations that he would enter the family’s oil refinery business and, encouraged by his mother Sybil, he set off to learn by studying the masters in the great galleries of Europe. Back in Ireland in the early 1940s, he quickly became a central figure in the fledgling Modernist movement. His early paintings, mostly of families and marginalised Traveller communities, gave way to studies of the isolated human presence throughout the 1950s. In the following decade he began a new series of works centred on the human head, leading on to the innovative, incisive portrait studies of Irish literary giants James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Samuel Beckett and more, for which he probably remains best known. Aidan Dunne, March 2026