ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 25 MARCH 2026

74 54 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Image of Samuel Beckett (1988) Watercolour, 40 x 31cm (15¾ x 12¼”) Signed and dated (19)’88 Provenance: With Taylor Galleries, Dublin, label verso € 10,000 - 15,000 ‘As a painter, I have always been concerned with one or other aspect of the body as an image of the human being. In recent years I have turned more specifically to the poet’s head as an image of human conscious- ness.’ Le Brocquy Notes on Painting and Awareness, Louis Le Brocquy , Dorothy Walker, Dublin 1981, p.135 His interest in the human face began with a series of paintings in 1964/65 centred on the heads of an- cestral figures from Irish history such as Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmett, Oliver Plunkett. He moved later to the giants of Irish Literature, James Joyce, W. B Yeats and Samuel Beckett, which were a continuation, in many ways of those earlier heads, exploring the links between the historical and contemporary Irish identity central to each of these writers works. These individuals were exalted within cultural memory for their creative influence and the impact they had on Irish literature. Le Brocquy and Beckett had a long and enduring friendship, and this works sits amongst numerous representations of him painted between 1979 and 2015. In this present work, painted in 1988, his fea- tures very gently emerge from the white background, his distinctive characteristics, particularly his large eyes, hooded by a strong brow, are picked out in deep blue shadows. The head paintings, represent an attempt to get a sense of the individual, not as a complete entity but rather as fragments from the bodies, from the people themselves. It is an essence of the figure, captured through, at times, quite minimal touches of paint. As with all the head paintings Beckett is suspended, iso- lated in within the white space of the artist’s canvas embodying an air of contemplative silence. Niamh Corcoran, March 2026