WHYTE'S in association with CHRISTIE'S - The Ernie O'Malley Collection MONDAY 25 November 2019

108 6 Louis le Brocquy, who is now twenty-nine, has had no formal Art School training, nor had he, until he was twenty years of age, more than an intelligent interest in painting. One day, when studying reproductions of Rembrandt and of Manet, he suddenly realized that painting was a vital process and that it concerned himself. It was as if a door to a hidden world had been suddenly swung open: what had formerly been latent meaning and a pleasant preoccupation now became understanding combined with feeling and imaginative perception. This sudden flash of illumination decided his direction, and from that day onwards he became in essence a painter. Le Brocquy’s earlier work shows the influence of Manet, Velasquez, and Goya; then came an interest in Dégas, Whistler, and in a use of Oriental line. The ever-present danger of preoccupation with the incidentals of representing reality made him seek other methods. Jack Yeats helped him by his imaginative conception, symbolic interpretation, and by the sheer poetic implication of his paint. Through simplification le Brocquy learned economy of means and the use of suggestion. His handling of broader masses was replaced by an interest in planes. His colour became more subdued as a study of form led to a new sense of its organisation and a different feeling for line. During the last war [WorldWar II 1939-1945], Ireland, cut off from outside activity, was driven back to her sea boundary. Economically the country had to become self-supporting and in this attempt a new strength and assurance was created, reflected by an added interest in painting and in music. For painters, this shutting away of the outside world tended to dim foreign impact. For years there had been the abstract influence of Glieze and Lhôte at work through their pupils, as well as an understanding of present-day European painters. As nineteenth-century and contemporary work is very poorly represented in Irish galleries, students have had to depend on visits to Europe for analysis, understanding and stimulation. The need for the steady influence of good examples of creative work, which can meet prejudice or change it to acceptance or understanding, was most felt during the war. Indeed, until generosity enriches this deeply felt want, people and painters here will remain isolated from first-class minds expressing contemporary ideas in terms of paint. But one result of this withdrawal was that artists had more time to assess themselves and to develop their own personal contribution. Some, for the first time, discovered the influences and creative possibilities of their own landscape; le Brocquy was amongst these. Irish landscape reflects the remoteness of this country from the industrial revolution. In this it echoes an attitude of the Irish mind, which has also been separated from Roman centralization, and somewhat from the Renaissance and the result of the Reformation. There is a dual quality in the landscape which can induce a merging or a withdrawal. From one aspect results an aloof, impersonal sense of remoteness or of hostility to Man, in which hills tower in imaginative height over small holdings and well-divided fields. At times it seems an undiscovered land which Man has yet to explore. With such an aspect there can be no sentimentality, and as a result there is no sentimental attachment. Louis le Brocquy wandered through Connemara, a gaunt, ragged district of mountain form, freckled lakes, broken bouldered slopes bedazzled with light and serrated with an edge of sea. The sense of formal composition and defined pattern met with in French landscape and elsewhere is seldom seen here. Harsh light, which strongly emphasizes form and structure, is absent also. Instead is an untamed country lacking in pattern, whose informality makes it easier for people and their world to dovetail and create a mood, and whose elusive colours merge and orchestrate in atmospheric softness. For le Brocquy, as for others, the land was an absorbing challenge, which for a time replaced continental conceptions of paintcraft, and demanded expression in a personal idiom. In his oils le Brocquy draws first in charcoal, which is then fixed, and paint is scumbled over the preliminary priming to make it as translucent as possible. He feels his way in colour, which is put on in transparent layers and emphasized by brush stroke or finger rubbing. The thin layers are a reaction to his former thicker use of the medium, and an attempt to break down the opacity of oil. He draws his brush sideways or across the fleck paint on the surface as an aid in creating textural richness. The transparent priming achieves the same effect as gesso, and the Louis Le Brocquy by Earnán O’Malley Extract from Horizon, XIV: 70 London, July 1946 Louis le Brocquy on Achill, 1945. Photograph by Helen Hooker O’Malley. Image courtesy of Gallery of Photography Ireland.