WHYTE'S EXCEPTIONAL IRISH ART MONDAY 7 DECEMBER 2020

32 22 Maurice MacGonigal PPRHA HRA HRSA (1900-1979) LANDSCAPE WITH CHURCH, ROUNDSTONE, 1962 oil on board signed lower left; with original exhibition label on reverse 20 by 30in. (50.8 by 76.2cm) Frame Size: 26 by 36in. (66 by 91.4cm) Condition: This work appears to be in very good condition. Some minor surface dirt visible on close inspection. Provenance: Dawson Gallery, Dublin; Private collection Exhibited: ’Maurice MacGonigal PRHA’, Dawson Gallery, Dublin, 4-24 March 1970, catalogue no. 17 Painted in the summer of 1962 and in the original Dawson Gallery frame. The little house on the right is the old chapel of the first monastery in Roundstone, built in 1842 for the Franciscan Brothers of Mountbellew. They had been drafted into the area by John McHale, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Tuam, to counteract the work of the Hibernian Bible Society and the Scottish Presbyterian Preachers in Connemara and to prevent the people from reading the bible and stop them speaking Irish. In the first half of the nineteenth century there was a major struggle in Connemara by the various Christian sects for the souls, hearts and minds of the people. The church was completed in early 1842, but in 1880 was reworked and rededicated as The Star of the Sea, one of the titles given to the Virgin Mary in the Litany of the Saints. To the viewer’s left can be seen the old national school and beyond that the old RIC (later Garda) barracks. That same year the artist painted in the Roundstone house portraits of Mervyn Wall, the writer, and his wife Fanny Feehan, a musician and music critic. He also painted Maurice Gorham, the broadcaster whose family home was further along the road beyond Murvey, the Duchess de Stacpoole and her granddaughter Biddy, and the editor of Botteghe Oscure and later a collector and dealer of note, Seán Ó Críadhaín. The de Stacpoole portrait survives in that family ownership and the Mervyn Wall portrait was bequeathed by him to the Arts Council, where he had been secretary for many years. It is high summer and such was the weather that there was no water in the entire area; the village became quite Riviera-like in its atmosphere. The vividness of the colour scheme and the high tones are typical of his palette throughout his life, and by painting once only on a surface the pigment does not get muddied by under painting, nor is there a pentimento to distract from the surface patters of the pigment. The characteristically swift application of pigment with no under-drawing is very much the hallmark of the painter then and throughout his life of painting in the open air and gives a joyous sense of the brilliant light and the heat on that long ago summer’s day in Connemara. Ciarán MacGonigal €1,500-€2,000 (£1,330-£1,780 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot22