IMPORTANT IRISH ART 25 MAY 2026

76 From 1945, in the years immediately following the end of WorldWar II, Louis le Brocquy carried out his ‘tinker’ or ‘Traveller’ series of works. The artist was acutely aware of the way in which Travellers were viewed, and saw parallels with the adverse social attitude towards gypsies in parts of Europe at the time. Le Brocquy became familiar also with the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) on gypsies, quoting from Lorca’s poetry in an essay published in 1979. 1 The artist mentions in the article that he came to understand Lorca through plays by John Millington Synge, and comments that Lorca, too, knew Synge’s work. Whatever the literary sources, Louis le Brocquy explained in a discussion that the Traveller series emerged when he was commissioned to undertake an artwork in the Irish midlands. While there, he observed a Traveller encampment and was struck by a number of factors. As an artist, he identified with their place on the fringes of society, with their exclusion, with the suspicion in which they were perceived, and he was consequently empathetic with that experience. He explained also that he understood the Traveller community as independent, with its own standards of behaviour and of familial relationships, and he spoke also of the value of what he observed as an intrinsically close-knit, matriarchal society. 2 The Traveller series represented a significant breakthrough for the artist whose work over the decades involved a varied and deepening exploration of the human condition. For him, the Traveller group experienced exclusion based in prejudices for their difference from settled communities, and for their adherence to their nomadic way of life. The present painting, Travelling People (1945), is one of the most significant examples of the series. Even so early in his career (he was around the age of 30), the artwork demonstrates Louis le Brocquy’s personal, independent aesthetic. While based in figuration - a constant throughout his oeuvre - he departed nonetheless from a literal and illusionistic form of representation, seeking instead to indicate something of the interior life of his subject. One of the earliest works of the series, the title Travelling People is literal, giving little indication to the viewer of how it might be read, and open therefore to interpretation. However, it deals with a subject that was potentially fraught, and was generally avoided by artists at that time. The image comprises a composed group of four individuals, three adults and a youth, each facing outwards but with their gazes somewhat askance. The central female, whose face is framed by her dark hair, is suggestive of an Egyptian prototype (indicative therefore of an ancient, established, heritage), while the red-haired figure to the right plays on a popular stereotype of Irish identity. The male figure on the left, with a soft cap, is doubled over, and appears to formulate an arrangement of twigs, referencing the superstitions that associated the group with paranormal rituals and symbols. As in other work by this artist, the innocent child-like figure - here on the right - is a balancing element both physically and psychologically, in a compelling but complex composition. The artwork, in common with the Travellers series in general, comprises washes of colour and graphic outlines, producing an image involving both drawing and painting techniques. Completed eighty years ago, Louis le Brocquy utilised a modernist aesthetic to address an Irish theme - combining antiquity, migration, exclusion, religio-mythical superstitions, but related to a familiar sight on the roads of contemporaneous Ireland. Dr Yvonne Scott, April 2026 Footnotes: 1 Louis le Brocquy quotes from Lorca’s poem‘Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard’ in his article, ‘Painting and Awareness’, Études irlandaises, no.4, 1979, pp.149-62. 2 Louis le Brocquy in discussions with Yvonne Scott, for the exhibition and catalogue, curated by Pierre le Brocquy and Virginia Teehan: Louis le Brocquy: Allegory and Legend, The Hunt Museum, Limerick, 2006. 45