ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 27 MAY 2026

42 17 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916 - 2012) Study for Riverrun: Procession with Lilies (1984) Oil on canvas, 54 x 65cm (21¼ x 25½”) Signed and dated 1984 verso Artist’s reference number: 520 Provenance: Collection of Reeta and Frank Hughes, Warren- point, thence by descent. Exhibited: Cork, Crawford Gallery, ‘ Louis le Brocquy - Procession ’, Oct/Nov 2003, travelling to Dublin, Taylor Galleries, Nov/Dec 2003 € 50,000 - 80,000 It’s not unusual that Louis le Brocquy might have noticed something in passing and mentally filed it away for process- ing. Eventually it might emerge in some form in his work, perhaps in conjunction with an apparently unconnected idea. Such was the case with a 1939 Evening Herald press photograph of cheerful Dublin schoolgirls in confirma- tion attire returning from the Church of Adam and Eve on Bloomsday, lilies held aloft. A friend sent him a cutting of the photograph in 1939. He is best known as a painter of the individual human being, though he periodically was drawn to family and social groups as subjects, and in 1954 a 17th century painting by Nicolaes Maes, of children playing in a wood, inspired an artistic response. Eventually the press photograph found its way into his work, first in 1962 and then, more extensively, in the 1980s and early 1990s. The spark was the fact that the image’s date became known as Bloomsday, and le Brocquy saw the moment as a cele- bration of these youthful, joyous figures immersed in the heart of the city of Dublin, looking forward to their lives to come, paralleling in his mind Joyce’s tracking of his charac- ters throughout the course of the day, depicting quotidian modernity on a classical, Homeric template. The timing also coincided with the recent publication of Joyce’s monumen- tal Finnegan’s Wake (hence the Riverrun). So Joyce, Dublin and the hopes and expectations of people in the city loom large in the Procession paintings. Born in Dublin in 1916, Louis le Brocquy grew up to be- come one of the leading Irish artists of the 20th century. His love of painting triumphed over expectations 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 stud- ies 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. His work features in numerous public and private collections. Aidan Dunne, April 2026