IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1 DECEMBER 2025

John Luke sketched and painted numerous images of vernacular architecture throughout his career. This painting of farmhouses dates from 1934 and from the transitional moment when Luke’s interest in topographical fidelity began to be displaced by a new decorative symbolism. Luke was a north Belfast native and spent his early years in a small, relatively confined area between York Street and the Antrim Road. Leaving school after he turned twelve, he worked in the nearby shipyard and later in a textile mill before attending Belfast School of Art. His earliest drawings and paintings record this small geographic space; its factories and the docks, its shops and red-brick terraces. But by 1931, when Luke returned from studying at the Slade School of Art in London he regularly cycled to sketch on the city’s edges, to the Cavehill and to Ballysillan, Mossvale, Skegoneill andWhitehouse and further afield. It is here he first drew farm buildings. In 1933 he sketched a farm in the townland of Ballyaghagan (Baile-Ui-hEochagain) that he then transformed into a brightly coloured woodcut (prints are held in the collections of the National Museum of Northern Ireland, ref. no. BELUM.Pt2 and IMMA, ref. no. IMMA.1184 MCCL). An example of this print also sold through these rooms as lot 34, 27 November 2017 (illustrated). This painting originates in the sketches made at the same time. The white-washed farmhouse, outer stone-buildings and dry-stone wall are faithfully rendered. Yet they are subordinate to an overall geometric schema of squares and cubes. This is further enhanced by the use of unnaturalistic colours - red furrows, lilac chimney stacks and blue mountains. The thin tree with its needle-like branches at the centre of the composition is striking - Luke gave the painting the title The Dead Tree. The painting was his first submission to the Ulster Academy of Arts (UAA) in October 1934 (no. 95) priced £15 15 0. One reviewer drew attention to Luke’s “modern technique” and further added, “it is a painting that cannot be neglected with its brilliant colour contrasts, its angularised figures, and houses of architectural solidity, and its rhythmically humped background.” Luke made a woodcut after the painting also entitled The Dead Tree (this can be found in the Collection of the National Museum of Northern Ireland, ref. no. BELUM.Pt22); only the painting features the figures and animals. The print was also exhibited at the UAA and at the Ulster Unit exhibition that December. This rarely seen and little known painting is one of Luke’s most beautiful and important early works. Dr. Joseph McBrinn, Belfast School of Art, October 2025