William Leech, R.H.A.

By direct descent from the artist to the previous owner;
Pyms Gallery, London, where purchased by the present owner in 1991

London, Pyms Gallery, Life and Landscape, May 1991, no.19, illustrated;
London, Barbican Art Gallery, Impressionism in Britain, no.123, 1995, with tour to Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin;
Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, William John Leech: An Irish Painter Abroad, 23 October - 15 December 1996, no. 33, with tour to Musée des Beaux Arts, Quimper and Ulster Museum, Belfast, 1997

Alan and Mary Hobart, Life and Landscape in French, British and Irish Painting at the Turn of the Century; London, 1991, p.48-9;
Denise Ferran, William John Leech: An Irish Painter Abroad, National Gallery of Ireland, 1996, p.152;
Kenneth McConkey, Impressionism in Britain, Yale University Press, 1995, p.152

Original canvas. The work appears in very good overall condition with a lovely impasto surface. Ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals minor cosmetic retouchings in some places across the canvas. Held in a gilt plaster frame.
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Painted circa 1910-13, Caves at Concarneau is a stand-out work within the artist's oeuvre and in the wider artistic context of the period. Radical in its execution, it exemplifies Leech's credentials as one of the most innovative painters of his generation, fully aware of the artistic trends taking place in France. It belongs to his most progressive and accomplished period between 1903 and 1919 when Leech was engaged in a sustained quest for 'trying to evolve sunlight and reflections'. 

Leech headed to Concarneau, Brittany in 1903 after finishing his training at the Académie Julian in Paris, following in the footsteps of his Irish predecessors, Nathaniel Hone, Walter Osborne and Roderic O'Conor. It was Concarneau and his 'contact with the Colony's underlying ideals which proved to be influential, and which had a decisive effect on his life and art' (Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, Sydney Lough Thompson: At Home and Abroad exhibition catalogue, 1990, p.34). The more traditional, academic approach of his formal training gradually gave way to a brighter palette and more spontaneous brushwork, evolving with ever-greater confidence as Leech grew increasingly familiar with painting en plein air, culminating in such works as the present. Caves at Concarneau embodies the freedom of expression that, as Denise Ferran comments, 'Leech assimilated with the Impressionists whom he had first experience in Dublin in 1899' (Ferran, op. cit., p.29). 

That Leech, by the time of the present work, was fully embracing Impressionism is evident here in the bold colouring and dappled brushstrokes, in the preoccupation with light and shadow and in the overall patterns created. Yellows, oranges, blues and pinks play off one another to dramatic effect. The painting reveals Leech's awareness of Monet, and recalls the artist's work of the late 1880s such as Study of Rocks, Creuse (private collection). However, the stronger colouration of the present work also reveals a proximity to the Fauves, who were pushing the underlying principles of Impressionism to new extremes. Further, the fluid brushwork and concern with movement and decoration evident in Caves at Concarneau echoes, as Ferran points out, the landscapes Sargent painted in Palestine, and it was the interest in design within his paintings that became increasingly important for Leech, anticipating his Aloes series painted in the South of France in the early 1920s.