IMPORTANT IRISH ART Monday 23 November 2026 from 6PM

104 71 Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) FANTAIL PIGEONS, 1984 oil on canvas signed and dated on reverse; also with Taylor Galleries label on reverse 15 by 18.25in. (38.1 by 46.4cm) Frame Size: 22.5 by 25.5in. (57.2 by 64.8cm) Provenance: Taylor Galleries, Dublin; Private collection, Dublin; Adam’s, 5 December 2006, lot 59; Private collection; Sotheby’s, 10 December 2014, lot 122; Private collection Exhibited: ‘Louis le Brocquy, Procession with Lilies and Other NewWork’, Taylor Galleries, Dublin, 1985, catalogue no.16 Louis le Brocquy is widely recognised as one of the greatest Irish artists of the twentieth century, and no collection of Irish art of the period would be complete without his inclusion. During his long career he explored a range of themes and styles, yet despite the breadth of his explorations, and his reference to international models, his work is distinctively his own. The current painting, Fantail Pigeons, was exhibited in early 1985 in the Taylor Galleries show, ‘Louis le Brocquy, Procession with Lilies and Other NewWork’. It comprised imagery that the artist identified as providing a revitalising divergence from the celebrated Head series which had dominated his work during the previous twenty years. These Heads - portraits of creative writers and artists - involved immersion in what he described as ‘their rather intense reflective consciousness’. The alternative subjects proved no less demanding, but offered different challenges. The theme of fantail pigeons was not a new one for le Brocquy. In the 1950s his wife, artist Anne Madden, recounts that sketches of doves led to a series of oil paintings. 1 Some years later, at their home in Carros in the south of France, he observed the white doves again, as they wheeled and fluttered around their home, engaging his interest in a remarkable series of paintings. The present work is an outstanding example; the nuanced tones and loose brushwork infer the vital physicality as well as the nervous energy of the subject. The forty-four works in the 1985 show ranged from representations of a procession of children based on an iconic newspaper image published in 1939, to various images related to nature, including several of fantail pigeons, described by the artist as: ‘ … the little natural things fulfilling their possibilities of shape and movement and life around me in my garden at home in France’. Dorothy Walker illuminated the emergence and impact of the paintings in a review, observing how ‘ … in his paintings of doves or fan-tailed white pigeons: their fluttery featheriness is transmuted into fluttery white paint not by attempting any realistic reproduction of a dove but by means of an image having its own inherent reality.’ 2 Commenting in general on his venture into the exuberance of nature, Louis le Brocquy observed that: ‘Nature is by definition ever present. It has no past other than its soil. I’ve tended to refer back to nature recently.’ He commented on his own practice, how the artist has little control over what or how he chooses to paint, responding instead to some ‘inner tide, to avoid being stranded.’ He continued: ‘Often I am stranded, but just now I seem to have caught some sort of ebb tide, to have returned to an older preoccupation in a shift back to natural things around me - to growing plants and fruit, and goldfish and fantail pigeons.’ 3 Dr Yvonne Scott, October 2026 Footnotes: 1 https://www.anne-madden.com/LeBPages/stilllife.html 2 Dorothy Walker, ‘Louis le Brocquy: The NewWork’, Irish Arts Review, Spring 1985, vol.2, no.1, pp. 12-17. 3 Louis le Brocquy, excerpt from an interview with Ann Cremin, Paris 1984, reproduced in Taylor Galleries, Louis le Brocquy, Procession with Lilies and Other NewWork, Dublin 1985. €60,000-€80,000 (£50,420-£67,230 approx.) Click here for more images and to bid on this lot7 1