Across from Inishlacken is Gerard Dillon’s ode to the West of Ireland - its people and its landscape. A horse gallops across white sands, a currach makes headway in the sea beyond which white, thatched cottages can be seen nestled on Inishlacken, while in the foreground a romance unfolds between a local fisherman and girl.

Dillon’s first encounter with Connemara in 1939 was a revelatory moment in the artist’s career. The beauty of the landscape and the simplicity of the way of life was far removed from Dillon’s upbringing within the terraced houses of Belfast and the socio-political tensions of the time. As his friend, critic and former director of the National Gallery of Ireland, James White, observed, the occupants of this untouched idyll captivated the young artist: ‘the changes of costumes, speaking voices and general easy pace of the life of the people… caught him unawares.’ They were, in essence, ‘the visible symbols of the country he had dimly dreamt of and idyllically desired to belong to’ (James White, Gerard Dillon, An Illustrated Biography, 1994, p.34).

This enchantment with the West produced some of Dillon’s most significant paintings, and the body of work that represents his visits there rank among the most recognisable and celebrated in the canon of 20th century Irish art. The present painting dates to circa 1951 - the year that Dillon had been offered the use of a cottage on the remote island of Inislacken just off Roundstone, and to whom he invited fellow artists George Campbell and James MacIntyre to join him (documented forty years later in James MacIntyre’s Three Men on an Island, 1996).

Dillon was an untutored artist - he had abandoned classes at the Belfast School of Art, mindful that they might corrupt the simplicity and originality that he strove for in his paintings. Dillon sought a poetic, personal and expressive approach in his art, and to this end cultivated a naive, child-like manner. When a friend remarked a child might have painted some of his pictures, Dillon replied:

This instinctive, untutored approach shares parallels with the aims of British Modernism in the early 20th century, famously represented in the paintings of the retired mariner Alfred Wallis, discovered in St Ives by Ben Nicholson and Christoper Wood in 1928. The freshness, vitality and directness of Wallis’ work which inspired Nicholson, Wood (see lot 2) and future generations is equally seen in Dillon’s art, exemplified in Across from Inishlacken but arrived at on his own terms.

The painting was bought from Victor Waddington, Dillon’s dealer, by Alfred Chester Beatty - the renowned mining engineer from America, art collector and philanthropist who moved to Ireland in 1950. Acquired shortly after it was painted, perhaps the work embodied the spirit of Beatty’s new homeland, or was purchased as a gift for his second wife, Edith, who was ill at the time (she died in 1952). Edith’s passion for horse racing or the romantic subject might have made it a perfect gift. Whatever the motivations, the work is assuredly one of Dillon’s most evocative paintings, and a major example to re-appear on the open market.