WHYTE'S IMPORTANT IRISH ART Monday 11 March 2024 at 6pm

84 57 BarbaraWarren RHA (1925-2017) LIKE A DREAM oil on canvas signed lower right; titled and with artist’s address [Gray’s Lane, Howth] on label on reverse 20 by 30in. (50.8 by 76.2cm) Frame Size: 24 by 34in. (61 by 86.4cm) Like a Dream is an outstanding example from Barbara Warren’s oeuvre embodying all the elements one would associate with the very best of her artistic output. The palette is typically cool and muted with a characteristically flattened perspective. The composition is sophisticated with colour employed to both divide and bring together the various pictorial elements. The figures are expertly drawn, their subtle curves contrasting with the sharp lines of the dwellings behind them, and while the work feels distinctly Modern and European the feeling it inspires also sits comfortably within the traditional West of Ireland scene. Barbara Warren died at the age of 91 and her death marked the end of a living connection to a generation of pioneering Irish female artists among them Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, May Guinness, Norah McGuinness and Elizabeth Rivers, who, like Warren, studied in Paris under the ‘academician of Cubism’ 1 André Lhote. Born in Dublin, Warren studied at NCAD (1947) having previously spent a period in Belfast playing her part in the war effort maintaining Lancaster bombers. She continued her studies in London at the Regent Street Polytechnic (1950) before travelling to Paris to study under Lhote. There she learned to build form through colour, a technique she developed and made her own over the course of her long career. Returning to Ireland she studied landscape painting in the west with Charles Lamb and set up a studio in Dublin with fellow artist Anne King-Harman. Solo exhibitions at the Dublin Painters and Dawson galleries followed and she also contributed to major group shows including the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and Irish Contemporary Art in Germany - 7 Artists. She won a Purser-Griffith travel scholarship in the history of European painting in 1955 and this afforded her the opportunity to travel - mostly on her own - through Spain, Italy and to Ibiza. She married fellow artist William Carron in 1961 and they settled in Howth. The birth of their daughter followed and during this period she contributed mainly to group exhibitions including the RHA shows, Oireachtas and Irish Painting, Hugh Lane, 1963. She returned to NCAD in a teaching capacity from 1973-1983 and held solo shows at the Dawson and later Taylor galleries until the 1990s. Warren won the James Kennedy Memorial Award for portraiture from the RHA in 1990, and a career achievement prize at the Florence Biennale in 1999. A retrospective of her work was held at the RHA in 2002/2003. Warren’s work was exhibited most recently when it was included in ‘It Took a Century: Women Artists and the RHA’ at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2023. The address inscribed on the label on reverse records the artist’s address as Gray’s Lane, Howth. The present work must date to after 1961 when the artist moved to this address after her marriage to William Carron. Adelle Hughes, February 2024 Footnote: 1 . Analysing Cubism, exhibition catalogue, IMMA, Dublin, 2013, p.20 €4,000-€6,000 (£3,420-£5,130 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot57