WHYTES
SINCE 1783
,
52
66
Gerard Dillon (1916-1971)
HOME WITH THE CATCH
oil on canvas
signed lower right
23 by 23½in. (58 by 58cm)
Provenance:
Waddington Galleries, Dublin;
Where purchased by the present owner’s father
Exhibited:
‘Four Ulster Painters’, Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin,
September, 1947;
‘Four Ulster Painters’, Heals Mansard Gallery, London, May to
June 1948, catalogue no. 36 (a joint exhibition with Daniel
O’Neill, George Campbell and Neville Johnson);
‘Gerard Dillon, Art and Friendship Summer Loan Exhibition’,
Adam’s, Dublin, 2-26 July 2013 (travelled to Ava Gallery,
Clandeboye, 1-29 August 2013) catalogue no. 39
Literature:
‘Gerard Dillon, Art and Friendship Summer Loan Exhibition’,
Adam’s, Dublin, 2013, catalogue no. 39, p.41 (illustrated)
Gerard Dillon was born in West Belfast in 1916 but spent much of his
life in London where he earned a living as a painter and decorator.
Many of his most popular, and important, paintings depict scenes of
everyday life on the west coast of Ireland. He first visited the west in
1939 and became enchanted with the landscape and the people,
making them the major theme of his work throughout the 1940s and
1950s.
Home with the Catch
is a western scene where a young family make
their way through the village with their daily catch of fish. Fish were
both a staple of their diet and a commodity that they could trade.Their
clothing is recognisable as the traditional dress once common in
Connemara and the Aran Islands.The woman’s red skirt and white
woollen jumper along with the man’s baggy woollen trousers and
waistcoat and their simple leather shoes, known as pampooties, locate
this image in a particular time and place. Stylistically similar to
Irish
Peasant Children
(c.1949), this work also resembles the young couple
carrying fish depicted in Dillon’s textile work
Gentle Breeze
, which he
hand stitched in 1952.
Recalling his first experience of the western seaboard, Dillon wrote that
the west was ‘a great strange land of wonder to the visitor from the
red-brick city’.
1
Like many artists and writers before him, he held a
romantic view of the west as both the locus of an authentic Irish
culture and a ‘primitive’ place, free from many of the restraints of wider
Irish society.Writing in 1955, he claimed that Connemara is ‘the place
for a painter’ and eulogising about the variety of the rugged landscape,
the quality of the light and the simplicity of daily life, concluded: ‘one
could live here forever but being neither a fisherman nor farmer, but
only a painter, I’m forced to come back to city life to sell work – and
hope to save enough to come back to Connemara’.
2
Although Dillon recognised that he was an outsider in Connemara,
during the period he spent living on Inishlacken in 1950, he adopted
elements of traditional dress, travelled back and forth to the mainland
in a currach and embraced the way of life wholeheartedly. As James
White pointed out: ‘For a nationalist Catholic like Gerard Dillon, living in
London and desperately wanted to belong to a Republican nation
called Ireland ... Connemara with its remoteness, its delightful stonewall
fields, mountains, lakes and seacoast and above all islands like
Inishlacken where he could cut himself off for a spell and live in a tiny
cottage, with no social life to speak of and a boat journey away from
barracks, church or pub – all this gave him the feeling of having found a
land free of all the restrictions of oppression which he had come to
accept as being there to offend him’.
3
Dillon’s initial interest in painting the west and its inhabitants was
sparked by Seán Keating’s illustrations for
Playboy of the Western
World
.William Conor’s focus on the daily lives of working people in
Ulster was another early influence. In
Home with the Catch
, Dillon
brings these influences together to create an original vision of the west
which combines romance and realism.
Dr Riann Coulter
April 2014
1
Gerard Dillon, ‘The Artist Speaks’, Envoy, 4 February, 1951, p.39.
2
Gerard Dillon, ‘Dear Tourist’,
Ireland of the Welcomes
, Bord Fáilte, Dublin,
May/June, 1955, p.30.
3
White, James,
Gerard Dillon: An Illustrated Biography
, Dublin:Wolfhound Press,
1994, p.10.
€
60,000-
€
80,000 (£49,590-£66,120 approx.)
