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Gerard Dillon (1916-1971)
SHAWL
oil on board
signed lower right; titled on label on reverse
9.5 by 14in. (24.13 by 35.56cm)
This painting, depicting a woman sheltering two children under a traditional shawl, is set in a landscape that
has the distinctive stone walls and white cottages of Connemara. Dillon first visited the west in 1939 and
continued to spend periods painting in Connemara throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. The figure of
the woman sheltering her children has echoes of Beatrice Elvery’s famous image Éire (1907). That painting
depicts a female figure, half Madonna, half Celtic goddess, sheltering the people of Ireland in the folds of
her green cloak. Bought by Maud Gonne for St. Enda’s, the school that Padraig Pearse founded in Ranelagh,
Éire combines nationalism and religion to create an iconic image that helped to inspire the struggle for Irish
independence.
Dillon was brought up in a Catholic and nationalist family in the Falls Road area of west Belfast and although
he was to lose his faith and spent most of his life in London, he remained a committed nationalist and fa-
mously withdrew his work from the Irish Exhibition of Living Art when it toured to Belfast in 1969 in protest
at Civil Rights abuses in the North. Although Shawl is not an explicitly nationalist painting, both Dillon’s love
of Connemara, the area of Ireland least influenced by British rule, and his use of Catholic and Celtic imagery
within his work, enables a reading of this painting as part of his celebration of what he considered to be the
‘real’ Ireland.
Dr Riann Coulter
April 2016
€8,000-€12,000 (£6,300-£9,450 approx.)
Large Image & Place Bid Lot 40