WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 29 MAY 2023 AT 6PM

68 41 Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) IMAGE OF SEAMUS HEANEY, 1992 watercolour signed and dated lower right; with Taylor Galleries and Crawford Gallery labels on reverse 24.50 by 18.25in. (62.2 by 46.4cm) Frame Size: 31.5 by 24.5in. (80 by 62.2cm) Exhibired: Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, June and July 1994 Louis le Brocquy reached a decisive turning point in his work in 1964. He had made several dramatic advances in the later 1950s: narrowing his focus from multi-figure compositions to concentrate on the individual human presence, and dispensing with a great deal of the conventions of naturalistic colour. Instead, his figures seemed to materialise from a matrix of white light - he had been inspired by the sight of figures glimpsed against a white wall in the heat of a Spanish midday. Then, in 1964, he felt he had arrived at an impasse, to the extent that he destroyed what he had been working on. In this frame of mind he chanced to visit the Musée de l’Holme in Paris and was greatly struck by two things: Polynesian painted skulls, and the Celtic cult of the head, based on a view of the head as a magic box containing the individual spirit. Quiet soon, the artist began working on a new series of paintings, visualisations of ancestral heads. Over time, he explored his own ancestry by means of this “archaeology of the spirit.” He bowed to the idea that no single image could comprise a definitive account of a person, so that each painting offered a fragmentary glimpse, a glimpse that acknowledged the complexity of the incalculable inner world of the subject. Soon he took up the challenge of bringing this approach to bear on several of the greatest Irish literary figures: WB Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. The latter he knew as a friend. Seamus Heaney also fell into that category. They had first chanced to meet on a Belfast-Dublin train in the 1970s, when they struck up a lively conversation. The poet wrote of the painter’s heads in 1981 as being “quotations from bodies, from lives even…They are complete; they have come through.”The images of poet, he wrote, “should stand in relation to their poems.”They talked of Tollund Man, one of the iron age bog bodies, when they first met. Now Heaney compared le Brocquy’s paintings of poets as being like the head of Tollund Man: “an image that has seized hold of the eye and will not let it go.” It is a fitting description of the artist’s study of Heaney himself, dreamy and ethereal. Aidan Dunne, May 2023 €20,000-€30,000 (£17,540-£26,320 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot41