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

THE ERNIE O’MALLEY COLLECTION · 25 NOVEMBER 2019 AT 6PM 109 107 T ’ LECTION 25 E BER 2019 6 The three works by Louis le Brocquy, Tinker Diviner (1945), A Young Tinker Woman (1945), and Theatre Study for Red Roses for Me (1946) were carried out within a year or so of each other, during the mid 1940s, and while distinctively different, they also collectively demonstrate something of the artist’s interests at the time as he experimented both with subject matter and with methods of representation. In 1945, he was working on a commission in Tullamore, and as he cycled in the area in search of ideas, he came into contact with a group of Travellers, an ethnicity that had intrigued him for some time. For the next few years, the artist explored what has been described as his ‘Tinker’ phase, the common term then for Travellers. He explained that he was interested to address their way of life, but keen to avoid a characterisation that reduced them either to racist stereotypes or to the kind of broad generalisations that took no account of group distinctions. 1 While le Brocquy’s ‘tinker’ series includes a number of large- scale oil paintings, of particular interest are several smaller works that reflect the artist’s experimentation with materials, involving a combination of ink drawing and watercolour, or thinly-applied oils, often on gesso-primed hardboard, giving them a combined graphic and loosely ‘washed’ appearance that is typical of this period. Triangular facial forms are also in evidence, drawn from medieval sculpture, in particular the heads of the stylised Twelve Apostles carved on the base of Moone High Cross, Co. Kildare. Of the three works here, two are titled as ‘tinker’ subjects, while the third is a theatre study. However, all three are perhaps intended to reference what the artist identified with as the peripatetic, outsider lifestyle of Travellers, artists and performers – each in their own way ‘outcast’ from accepted norms of society at the time. Dr Yvonne Scott is Associate Professor, History of Art at The University of Dublin, Trinity College, and Director of Irish Art Research Centre. 1 Observations are drawn from a discussion between Louis le Brocquy and Yvonne Scott, 28th April, 2006 in preparation for the exhibition curated by Virginia Teehan, Louis le Brocquy, Allegory and Legend, at the Hunt Museum, Limerick, 2006. scumbling creates a movement in this underlying paint. The total effect is a richly luminous surface, broken up and livened by this method and again helped towards unity by the fusion of these transparent areas. Every part of the composition now functions equally. From 1942 le Brocquy experimented with form and avoided emphatic colour. In his series of ‘Classic Themes’ he used the human bodies purely as an exercise in form in an architectural way. Legs become pillars, knees and arms seem to emphasize weight and stress, and the body is distorted as a sense of supporting mass is built up. The colour is confined to somber green-grey, and the total effect is severely gaunt. In 1945 le Brocquy, whilst in the midlands near Tullamore, became interested in tinkers, who are peculiar to this country, and in no way related to gypsies. They may have in them a basis of the wandering scholar and craftsman, and their language, the Shelta, has a word use in Irish, but largely they are the once- dispossessed people of confiscations wandering without security of land through the countryside. By trade they are tinsmiths and horse jobbers, beggars in a wheedling monotonous and patterned chant in towns, but in the country, they induce hospitality by the involved drama of their conversational skill. Their doctoring of horses, by which, for a short time during a fair, a broken-winded, limping animal becomes a glistening, high-stepping edition of a bloodhorse, results in enviable or reluctant folklore amongst settled landsmen. They are lithe and hardy, sharp in feature, and capable of sudden calls on endurance from their uncertain way of life in a difficult climate. With them primitive emotions are easily aroused and expressed; their women drink and fight as readily as their men, and bear children without halting the day’s journey. Their aloofness, intractability, and fierce independence interested le Brocquy. They are, he could see, outside of the closely organised life of the parish unit, looked on with mistrust and suspicion, but generally treated with the tolerance given in the country to groups outside of its parish life. They become a symbol of the individual as opposed to organized, settled society, and to the growing power-control of the State; a symbol, also, of the distressed and dispossessed people of Europe wandering, unlike the tinkers, without hope of changing their condition by individual effort. For the creative worker they could represent the artist who deals in the unexpected and the unrecognized, and who suffuses with meaning familiar things against the inanition of their too facile and unmeaning acceptance. Works by Louis le Brocquy in this auction by Yvonne Scott