ADAM'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 27 MAY 2026

78 39 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Towards an Image of W.B.Yeats (1992) Watercolour, 62 x 46cm (24½ x 18’’) Signed and dated (19)’92 Provenance: With Taylor Galleries, Dublin; Sale, these rooms, 26/4/2004, lot 144 € 12,000 - 16,000 For le Brocquy, his paintings of heads were a continual process of excavation and speculation. They were in a sense portraits, most often of literary figures including Beckett, Joyce and Yeats. But his aim was not to capture a likeness per se, but to capture a sense of each writer’s unique consciousness. No attempt could be defini- tive or complete, hence his always working “towards an image”. The works ultimately stemmed from a chance visit to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1964, when he felt at a dead end in his work. He was greatly struck by two things there: Polynesian painted skulls, and the Celtic cult of the head, based on a view of the head as a magic box containing the individual spirit. Quite soon, the artist began working on a new series of paintings, visualisations of ancestral heads. Over time, he explored his own ancestry by means of this “archaeology of the spirit.” In this way he concluded that no single image could comprise a definitive account of a person, each painting could offer a fragmentary glimpse, a glimpse that acknowledged the complexity of the incalculable inner world of the subject. From his own ancestors he moved on to attempt images of several writers. Intriguingly, in the case of Yeats, there was an indirect though close connection. “My mother,” he related in a 2005 lecture, “was a friend of the Yeats family in Dublin and so, as a child, I was fairly familiar with WB’s appearance and with his extremely impressive manner.” Even within a single image it is apparent that the artist’s view encompasses multitudes. He commented on the way that, out of a series of photo- graphs, even though all might be objectively faithful, their effectiveness at capturing a subject will vary. In each painting, we seem to look into multiple layers and possi- bilities, laid on with great sensitivity, from which emerge an almost ethereal sense of the person. Aidan Dunne, April 2026