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

28 15 CAMILLE SOUTER HRHA (B.1929) Fooling in the Tent Oil on board, 58.5 x 79cm (23 x 31“) Signed and dated 1974 Provenance: Collection Sir Basil Goulding; with The Dawson Gallery, Dublin; with Taylor Galleries, Dublin, Decem- ber 1982, Catalogue No.81. Exhibited: University of Limerick, ‘Familiar Faces ’, 2008; Drogheda and Castlebar ‘ Camille Souter/Nano Reid Ret- rospective’ exhibition, 1999, full colour plate in catalogue; Dublin, IMMA, ‘SIAR 50’ , 50 Years of Irish Art from the Collections of the Contemporary Irish Art Society, 2006. Literature: Garrett Cormican, ‘ Camille Souter: The Mirror in the Sea ’, 2006, illustrated. € 15,000 - 20,000 Camille Souter has worked in series from the beginning of her career in 1955. She has an insatiable curiosity and when a subject interests her, she will usually address it in a number of works. Fooling in the Tent is one of a series of paintings based on Clowns and Clowning that Souter produced in the 1950s and early 1960s. At the time she was bringing her young children to the Circus in Bray and Booterstown. This work recalls one such experience. As with her earliest monotypes of the Circus from 1955, the scene is highly abstracted. The figures are represented through symbols in a fashion reminiscent of psychic automatism. The two triangles on the upper right are a clearly a short hand for the peaked hats of the clowns who could be juggling on a high wire. Equally, the vertical lines on either side of the work may call to mind a trapeze. The gelatinous dribbles of cream enamel paint and arcing grey lines have been applied with enormous urgency. One never gets the feeling we are looking at something static or lifeless as one might had the scene been captured in painstaking, photographic, detail. There is a joyous vitality to the paint application that is perfectly tailored to the subject and very direct. Garrett Cormican, August 2019