Adam's The Antoinette and Patrick J.Murphy Collection 23rd October 2019

10 self being surreptitiously exposed to very fine examples of Irish painting. John Lavery’s Portrait of Hazel as Kathleen Ni Houlihan hung in the office of the Governor of the Bank at that time. The board room of Guinness’s had paintings by William Ashford and a fine view of the Pheonix Park by William Sadler on its walls. Paintings by Nathaniel Hone also graced the building. Pat found his curiosity aroused. The 1960s was an exciting time for visual art in Ireland. The economy was expanding dramatically and there was a sense of optimism and faith in the future that sparked a flourishing of art production. Pat Murphy was very much a product of this era. His early enthusiasm for collecting art drove him to seek out paintings in museums, auction houses and galleries, and wherever he could find them. The art market was still nascent at that time. It was possible to buy fine historical works for relatively little money and the contemporary art world was dominated by just two galleries, the Hendriks and the Dawson Gallery. On his early visits to the Dawson Gallery in the early 1960s, Pat was the youngest person present, surrounded by a small number of what seemed to him elderly people. He discovered a world where one could speculate financially but equally acquire, see and learn about the then largely overlooked world of Irish visual art. Part of the attraction was authenticating works, finding paintings of quality that had been missed by the experts and the thrill of acquiring a work of art at a good price. In the end, however, the desire to collect good quality art outshone financial prudence. As Pat later put, collecting requires courage, ‘Only the brave deserve art. Buy now, I say, not in the future’. 3 Pat’s taste was initially honed by almost daily visits to the Dawson Gallery, where he became close to Leo Smith. There he saw and acquired work by Brian Bourke, Evie Hone and Nano Reid. It was also the venue where Michael Farrell, Seán McSweeney and Louis le Brocquy showed. The collection is underlined by a keen but perhaps unconscious sense of the history of Irish art which Pat learnt through looking at work and by talking to everyone he met connected to this world, especially leading dealers and artists. He was a co-student of Michael Wynne, former assistant director of the National Gallery of Ireland, at Trinity College and clearly absorbed much about art from their discussions and collaborative buying ventures. Later Pat’s travels abroad and his increasingly prominent role in ROSC and the Arts Council ensured that he continued to be open towards new forms of contemporary art. Pat’s collecting was driven by passion, as he himself has written but there was also a genuine desire for knowledge about the process of painting and the history of art. As a young man he read one of the only books on 20th century Irish art history then available although out of print, Thomas Bodkin’s Four Irish Painters. This encouraged him to seek out works by historical painters such as James Arthur O’Connor, Walter Osborne and Nathaniel Hone in auction houses on the quays and in Adam’s Salerooms. His need to fill in the historical gaps in his collection may explain his acquisition of works by Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett’s mentor, Albert Gleizes, and the inspiration for Nano Reid’s ma- ture work, the Belgian painter, Marie Howet. There is something of the detective about how Pat seeks out artworks. From studying the development of an artist’s oeuvre, by looking closely at the physical construction of their work, he has trained himself to be a connoisseur. He is also knowledgeable and curious about the life and connections that artists make. From 1967, when be acquired his painting, The Strand near Arklow , he became fascinated by the life of the largely forgotten artist, Patrick Tuohy, later publishing an important monograph on the artist 4 . Speaking with living artists, visiting their studios and developing friendships with them has also been central to how the collection has developed. When living in London in the late 1960s, he made contact with two elderly and neglected Irish artists, W.J. Leech and Mary Swanzy. After seeing the latter’s retrospective exhibition at the Hugh Lane Gallery in 1968, Pat took the opportunity of visiting the artist, en- couraging her to revive her career in her nineties and to exhibit at the Dawson Gallery in 1974. Although ‘absolute opposites’ the two enjoyed each other’s company and had a high regard for each other. Pat and Antoinette also de- veloped friendships with younger artists, such as Seán McSweeney and his wife, Barrie Cooke and Sonja Landweer, Breon O’Casey, Louis le Brocquy and Anne Madden, Liam Belton, Basil and Helen Blackshaw and Patrick Collins. Nano Reid, who thought that Pat had ‘a good eye’, was a visitor to their home in Stepaside, as was Richard Long who created a land art piece in situ. These personal connections are central to the distinctiveness of Pat’s collection, deepening his desire and curiosity to understand their work and making him keenly aware of the role and responsibility of the collec- tor to support and nurture great art and those who produce it. His is one of the most extensive and diverse collections of modern Irish painting and sculpture in existence. It is a tribute to his judgement and abiding devotion to art. Dr. Róisín Kennedy, Summer 2019 1 Patrick J. Murphy, A Passion for Collecting. A Memoir by Patrick J. Murphy, Hinds, 2012. 2 Antoinette curated and co-wrote the catalogue for The Paintings of Paul and Grace Henry, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, 1991. 3 Vera Ryan, Movers and Shapers. Irish Art since 1960, Collins Press, 2003. 4 Patrick J. Murphy, Patrick Tuohy, Conversations with his Friends, Town House Publishing, 2004.