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

128 114 LOUIS LE BROCQUY HRHA (1916-2012) Head (F74) (1960) Oil on canvas, 77 x 63cm (30.3 x 24.8“) Signed Provenance: with Gimple Fils, London; with the Frederick Gallery, Dublin, October 1998. € 30,000 - 50,000 By the time Louis le Brocquy represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1956, winning an award for his major 1951 painting, A Family, his work had taken a radical new direction. As he recounted it, one day in 1955, passing through a village in La Mancha, he noticed a group of women and children standing against a whitewashed wall. In the dazzling sunlight, they seemed to blend with and emerge from the radiant whiteness of the wall. This glimpse suggested to him an entirely new way to paint the human figure. Rather than describing outward appearances, as if he were making a conventional picture of an object in three-dimensional space, he would try to convey a sense of being from the inside, emergent against a whitish, neutral ground. He found that this approach was more suited to the individual human presence, and he moved decisive- ly away from the complex figure compositions - like A Family - that had interested him. Another factor was the beginning of his relationship with the painter Anne Madden: she was undergoing spinal surgery to deal with legacy injuries from a riding accident. In a series of paintings of the female torso dating from the latter 1950s, the spine, rendered in thick impasto, is a central element. A landmark painting, Caroline , from 1956, again built up with thick masses of pigment, focuses on the head as a symbol of the whole person (the subject was a girl with Down’s Syndrome), and anticipates his dramatic move, in 1964, to an almost exclusive concentration on the human head. Head is one of just three or four paintings from 1960 that syhthesise aspects of both the torso paintings and Caroline , combining inner and outer worlds. And like Caroline , Head is a key transitional work that anticipates and forms the basis of the subsequent head images. Born in Dublin in 1916, Louis le Brocquy was earmarked to go into the family oil refinery business es- tablished by his grandfather. But he did not warm to studying chemistry and, with his mother’s backing decided to pursue his interest in art. He learned by looking at and copying the great works in English and European galleries. Back in Dublin in 1940, he quickly established himself as one of the leading Irish artists and remained so. He spent some years living and working in London and then France before eventually returning to settle in Dublin. The human figure, or more accurately the human being, was always at the core of his work and the strength and originality of his paintings earned him an interna- tional reputation. Aidan Dunne, August 2019