WHYTE'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART 28 NOVEMBER 2016

Gerard Dillon (1916-1971)

HANDS ACROSS THE BORDER

woolen tapestry mounted on raw linen

62 by 44in. (157.48 by 111.76cm)

Provenance:

The artist’s family by descent;

deVere’s, 30 March 2004, lot 168;

Private collection

Exhibited:

‘Nano Reid & Gerard Dillon’, Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, 6 November 2009 to 10 January 2010

Framed in pitch pine recycled from the pews of Burnfoot Presbyterian Church, Co. Donegal.

The earliest documented tapestry of Dillon’s is the large work titled Gentle Breeze, now in the collection

of Bord Fáilte. Gentle Breeze was begun in 1950 and exhibited three years later at the Irish Exhibition of

Living Art (no. 61), where it was widely recognised as the outstanding entry in that year’s show. James

White discusses the piece at some length in his monograph on Dillon, drawing attention in particular to

the element of painstaking manual labour involved in such a project: “Most modern painters and tapes-

try designers send their cartoons to the great tapestry factories to be woven there, but Gerard started his

own in Roundstone, at a time when he ran out of painting materials and perhaps adequate cash; obtain-

ing a large canvas base and able to acquire wool ends in different colours locally, he set out to master

the handcraft practised in cottages around the world for many hundreds of years” (James White, Gerard

Dillon: An Illustrated Biography, Wolfhound Press, 1994, page 61).

Dillon evidently enjoyed the work, for he is known to have executed at least two other tapestries: Island

Tapestry (IELA, 1953, no. 9) and the present work, Hands Across the Border. In subject and composition

Hands Across the Border is typical of Dillon’s consummate creativity; the flattened shapes of the two

figures at once intertwine and flare outwards in a decorative design redolent of folk art. White considered

the work to “represent Dillon’s feeling for his country, a man born and brought up in Ulster yet totally at

home in the West of Ireland”

€5,000-€7,000 (£4,550-£6,360 approx.)