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

32 19 PATRICK COLLINS HRHA (1911-1994) Sligo Landscape (1965-67) Oil on canvas 69.5 x 90cm (27.3 x 35.4“) Signed Exhibited: Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, ‘Shaping Ireland: Landscapes in Irish Art ’, April-July 2019; Edinburgh Open Exhibition, c.1968. Literature: NGI, Donal Maguire Ed., Shaping Ireland: Landscapes in Irish Art , 2019, illustrated p.29. € 20,000 - 30,000 Collins was born in Dromore West, County Sligo, growing up at the edge of Sligo town. He said that his life was shaped by the local countryside far more than by family, friends or school. His complete identifica- tion with those rural surroundings consistently formed the foundation of his painting. He turned again and again to painting his youthful memories of roaming the fields near Sligo but was more interested in conjuring up the feelings he experienced when confronting nature rather than picturesque views. In doing so, he created paintings with haunting emotional intensity. Literature also nurtured Collins’ childhood imagination, with the works of modern Irish writers like W.B. Yeats, Synge and Joyce (particularly Joyce) stimulating him as a young man. He particularly admired Joyce for the way he embraced indigenous Irish subject matter, while he stylistically broke new literary ground internationally. Collins wanted to do the same with painting, which one can see in his approach to Sligo Landscape. The subject springs directly from rural Ireland, where colours are softened by the diffused silvery grey light of an overcast day, with edges softened as if veiled by mist. Although there is the sug- gestion of hills in the far distance, some bogland, a small stream, divided fields and some cultivation in the foreground, Collins deliberately avoids depicting his subject in a literal way. He identified with what he called the ‘Celtic imagination’, where by steering clear of precise representation an artist reveals the essence of a place that hovers beneath the seen surface. Here, he condenses the elemental character of the isolated West-the cold, the wind, the silvery light, the wetness of the atmosphere, the contained fields and the loneliness. However, like Joyce, Collins wanted to express this vision in contemporary terms. In tune with new aesthetic thinking of the mid-1960s he accepts the inherent flatness of the pic- ture surface, reducing the subject to a few nearly abstract lines. These lines are the framework on which Collins can hang the voids, and it’s in these empty spaces that we find the poetry, the nuances of light and texture, the delicate touch of the brush, the modulations of colour. Sligo Landscape expresses a romantic view of Ireland that grew out of Collins’ direct experience of a pre-industrialised rural existence, a view nurtured on poetry and ballads. A comment in a review of his very first one man show in 1956 is as pertinent now as then, that Collins “stimulates the imagination like the aroma of a forgotten place, calling back the most startling memories.” Dr Frances Ruane HRHA, July 2019