ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 27 MAY 2026

22 10 GERARD DILLON (1916 - 1971) Tea Party (1955) Oil on board, 86 x 99cm (34 x 39”) Signed, inscribed with title verso. Provenance: With The Dawson Gallery, Dublin, where purchased by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Their sale, So- theby’s 24th November British and Irish Art, 1993, lot 53; Collection of Reeta and Frank Hughes, Warrenpoint, thence by descent. Exhibited: Dublin and Belfast, Irish Exhibition of Living Art, 1955, no.101. £75; Dublin, Gerard Dillon’s Early Paintings of The West, Dawson Gallery, 1971 (March), no.6; Belfast, Gerard Dillon 1916-1971: A Retrospective Exhibition (Nov-Dec) 1972, Ulster Museum & Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gallery, travelling to Dublin, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, (Jan-Feb) 1973, with An Chomhairle Ealáion, Dublin (Jan-Feb) no.59; Drogheda, Gerard Dillon 1916-1971 A Retrospective Exhibition , Droichead Art Centre, (Jan-Feb), Linen Hall Library and Arttank, Lisburn Road(Feb -Mar) ,Belfast, 2003, no.28 Dublin, Gerard Dillon, Art & Friendships , Adam’s Summer Loan Exhibition, (July), travelling to The Ava Gallery, Clandeboye, Co. Down (August), No. 1 Literature: Eamonn Mallie, One Hundred Years of Irish Art , 2000 p.119; Gerard Dillon 1916-1971, A Retrospective Exhibition, 2003, front cover illustration; Karen Reihill, Gerard Dillon: Art & Friendships , 2013, p.1 € 150,000 - 200,000 First exhibited at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (IELA) in Dublin in 1955, alongside Little Girl’s Wonder , Self-Con- tained Flat , and Inishlacken Couple , this work reached a wider audience when the IELA travelled to Belfast for the first time marking an important new stage of exposure for the artist in his native city. After becoming a committee member of the IELA in 1950, Dillon likely hoped a Belfast audience would become familiar with his work and that of his contemporary Northern Irish artist friends. But owing to its imposing scale, it was his Self-Contained Flat that drew most of the media attention, overshadowing other works in the exhibition. Decades later, interest in Tea Party broadened following a retrospective in Belfast in 2003, when Belfast writer, Gerard Keenan, who knew the artist in the 1950s travelled from London to view the exhibition hanging at the Linen Hall Library and Bernard Jaffa’s Arttank Gallery. When Tea Party was last exhibited in Northern Ireland—as part of Adam’s 2013 summer loan exhibition, Gerard Dillon: Art & Friendships , Hal Rice, who also knew the artist in London in the late 1950s revisited the work and both he and Keenan offered varied interpretations of its narrative. Other visitors approached Tea Party with fresh curiosity, speculating about the identities of the sitters, the context surrounding the scene, the subtle compositional devices, and the artist’s use of colour. Questions also arose about intriguing details within the composition, particularly the chairs, which appear to be deliberately positioned towards the picture plane. While visiting the exhibition at Clandeboye, Co. Down, in 2013, Hal Rice suggested that the narrative of Tea Party was autobiographical. He pointed to the presence of the artist’s close friends, Madge and George Campbell as well as ele- ments of Dillon’s characteristic impish, wiry humour in the sitters’ facial expressions. In Rice’s view, the central male figure gazing directly at the viewer and wearing a red neck scarf represented the artist himself. Although Dillon’s bald head and moustache are concealed, Rice speculated that the domestic scene may have been inspired by an amusing incident or a moment Dillon wished to capture during one of his visits to Connemara.