WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART Monday 19 October 2020

84 54 Gerard Dillon (1916-1971) BLUE HOOP oil on board signed lower left; inscribed on reverse 17.50 by 23in. (44.5 by 58.4cm) Frame size: 27 by 31in. (69 by 79cm.) Provenance: Apollo Gallery, Dublin; Private collection; Whyte’s, 17 September 2002, lot 87; Private collection Exhibited: ’Exhibition of Paintings by Gerard Dillon’, Arts Council Gallery, Belfast, August to September 1966, catalogue no. 11 Self-trained as an artist, Belfast-man Gerard Dillon worked as a house-painter and decorator in his early years, though an interest in the arts was apparent even as a teenager. In 1939 he and a friend went on a cycling holiday in Connemara, an event which his biographer James White has since labelled “the most important development of his life” (Gerard Dillon: An Illustrated Biography, Wolfhound Press, Dublin, 1994). The imagery of the land, criss-crossed as it was by stone walls and dotted with cottages, and of the people in their brightly coloured home-spun clothes, remained with him for life and reappeared in many of his works. Dillon’s first solo exhibition was held in 1942 in the Country Shop on St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, and was opened by the champion of modern art in Ireland, Mainie Jellett. In 1943 Dillon showed his first work at the RHA. During the 1940s and ‘50s he became the rising star of the Irish avant-garde, his works widely exhibited and written about. His career has commonly been characterised as a succession of different phases, from his early naïve landscapes, to his final dream-scapes, populated by harlequins. The present work dates to this late phase and was shown in ‘Exhibition of Paintings by Gerard Dillon’ at the Arts Council Gallery, Belfast from August to September 1966 alongside works such as Landscape Artist, circa 1966, illustrated. (ILLUSTRATED; Whyte’s, 19 February 2007, lot 40, €33,000). As James White pointed out in his book Gerard Dillon: An Illustrated Biography, Dillon used Pierrot as an alter ego. The clowns Pierrot and Harlequin are popular tropes in art history. During the eighteenth century they appeared in the works of French and Italian painters including Watteau and Tiepolo, where they referenced the Commedia dell’Arte theatre tradition. In the first decades of the twentieth century both Pierrot and Harlequin were adopted by Modernists including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris whose Pierrot (1921) was among the paintings donated to the National Gallery of Ireland by Marie MacNeill Sweeney. Both in his origins in the Commedia dell’Arte and in his reinvention as a Modernist trope, Pierrot was associated with disguised identity, melancholia and gender confusion. 1 A retrospective was held the year after the artist’s death in 1972 at the Ulster Museum and later at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. The National Gallery of Ireland hold in their collection one of the artist’s last paintings, Self-Portrait with Pierrot and Nude (1971, NGI.4042) which presents the artist in the foreground with Pierrot and a stack of canvases in the background. This is thought to be the only image where both artist and alter ego appear together. Footnote: 1 Dr Riann Coulter for Whyte’s, 31 May 2010, lot 3; Magic in The Sky by Gerard Dillon €15,000-€20,000 (£13,330-£17,780 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot54 Whyte’s, 19 February 2007, lot 40, €33,000.