IMPORTANT IRISH ART Monday 4 December 2023 at 6pm, Lots 1-133

70 46 Gerard Dillon (1916-1971) ON THE BEACH, c.1950 oil on canvas signed lower left; inscribed ‘Sun Bathers’ on reverse 12 by 18in. (30.5 by 45.7cm) Frame Size: 16.5 by 22.5in. (41.9 by 57.2cm) Provenance: Adam’s, 4 December 2007, lot 128; Private collection Literature: James White, Gerard Dillon - An Illustrated Biography, Wolfhound Press, Dublin, 1994, p. 57 (illustrated) Using the faux naïve composition which he favoured and under the influence of Marc Chagall, the artist places the figures not on a flat picture plane but an upright horizontal or tiered format which he was to use in many of the later Clown and Burial works in order to create an immediate foreground. The artist takes advantage of adopting the twin compositional strands of Chagall with its floating world and the Japanese influence of giving several perspectives to create variable outlines and modified by internal passages of painting to give internal volume and using the linear structure to create an external sense of form and shape. Tilting the composition enables the painter to use forms of cubist figurative construction to convey his sense of the moment. On this sunny Connemara day the foreground figure is the artist himself in his middle 30s and he is demonstrating a point of discussion with his typical splayed fingers when he was picking off the arguments at his disposal. The upper male figure appears in many of his works especially his famous “The London Flat”where he is posed wearing a uniform. The sitter also appears in a number of other works, especially those painted in and around the island of Inishlacken and the wider Roundstone area to which the artist was to return over the 1950s and early 1960s with another artist, the Drogheda born Nano Reid. The background which is beautifully painted in a more narrative style, looking from the northern part of the Island towards Gortín on the mainland. The composition replicates his later works of figures in the grave, given that the composition has the stones bounding the foreground and the crashing waves on the island framing the internal construction, almost as a precursor to the later burial works. The skeletal boat in the middle distance is a reminder of the themes much favoured by the painter from a very young age those of the “memento mori”. The period of the early 1950s is when he, with fellow northern artists George Campbell, Arthur Armstrong and James McIntyre rented a house on Inishlacken Island and formed, for a short but important period, an island “school” of painting. This “school” formed an important segment of the semi cubist style of painting which was much exhibited in and admired at the annual exhibitions of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and also in Victor Waddington’s South Anne Street gallery and then in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery (later renamed the David Hendriks Gallery) on 1 St. Stephens’ Green later moving to Stephens’ Green West in Dublin. Many of Dillon’s best and most important works were based in the Inishlacken and Roundstone areas and the typical subjects were activities in the landscape: fishing, farming, turf cutting and footing, island interiors and some which can be called ‘fancy subjects’. He moved through various techniques to obtain a surface effect including papiers collès, impastoed sand surfaces and graphics, often mixing all the techniques to give his work their unique feel and sentiment. This is a work of immense charm and sunny in its compositional thrust and representing that moment of self realisation by a painter in a most successful and delightful figurative landscape of a long ago summer’s day on an Island in Connemara. Ciarán MacGonigal €20,000-€30,000 (£17,390-£26,090 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot46