William Leech, R.H.A. 1881-1968

Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, 1920, no.147 (£75);
London, Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, 1921, no.123 (as Lilies, one of only nine paintings ever exhibited by Leech at the London Academy);
Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, William John Leech, An Irish Painter Abroad, 1996, no.36.

Denise Ferran, 'W.J. Leech's Brittany', Irish Arts Review, 1993, pp.228-9, illustrated;
Denise Ferran, William John Leech: An Irish Painter Abroad, National Gallery of Ireland in Association with Merrell Holberton, London, no.36, illustrated in colour, p.165;
Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Ireland's Painters, 1600-1940, published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2002, p.292.

Leech first visited Concarneau, where The Secret Garden was painted, in 1903. The over life-size lilies, forming a glorious decorative pattern across a full scale canvas, the like of which is extremely rare in Leech’s work, suggest immediate parallels with John Singer Sargent’s earlier Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (fig.1, 1885-6, coll. Tate Britain). Sargent’s famous painting was possibly based on his previous Garden Study of the Vickers’ Children (1884, coll. Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan), which shows the two children dwarfed beneath the riotous curlicues of tall-stemmed casablanca lilies. However, unlike the earlier sketch, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose was conceived as a ‘salon’ piece: artful, contrived in its completion, and destined for exhibition at the conservative Royal Academy. It was not until 1887 that Sargent visited Monet at Giverny and was finally in a position to observe Impressionist methods at first hand – notably asking Monet at this time how he could possibly paint without the use of black. Leech’s The Secret Garden is a different picture entirely, showing as it does these lessons fully absorbed and translated by the artist’s own hand, one of the first and most forward-looking works of Leech’s glowing mature period in France.

A significant number of artists travelled between England, Ireland and Northern France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ideas spread: Walter Osborne’s English Cottage Garden, Uffington (fig.2, 1888, coll. National Gallery of Ireland, and possibly seen by Leech at the RHA Memorial Exhibition of 1903-4) bears close comparison with another ‘lily’ picture, Norman Garstin’s Madonna Lilies (private collection). However, the two nuns in Garstin’s background doorway rather suggest a Breton location, as with The Secret Garden. Leech travelled regularly, yet it was western Brittany that consistently saw the execution of his greatest work. Specifically, although he is known to have painted at Brest, Quimper and Quimperlé (The Goose Girl, c.1910-14, coll. National Gallery of Ireland), Concarneau was his most productive source of inspiration. This was due in part to a long convalescence spent there recovering from typhoid fever contracted in 1904, under the care of the town’s Sisters of the Holy Ghost. Initially attracted by the area’s picturesque subject matter and the quality of the coastal light, Leech was further intrigued by the nuns’ traditional dress and the sculptural form of their headdresses, as were Gauguin and O’Conor at Pont Aven before him. He painted his erstwhile nurses bustling past the battlements of the old town walls (fig.3, Les Soeurs du Saint-Esprit, Concarneau, sold in these rooms, 18^th June 1997, lot 50). The nuns were not however as freely available as models as an artist could have wished (Leech used costumed stand-ins, such as his companion Elizabeth Kerlin, in his later compositions). The grounds of the convent hospital very much represented a ‘secret garden’ and one to which Leech had had privileged access. It is probable that the later paintings, including The Secret Garden, were based on drawings that he made there in 1904.

The Secret Garden is titled after Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel of the same name, written in America in 1909, which tells the story of a young girl also recovering from typhoid, who finds respite in a secret, walled garden of her own. Denise Ferran comments that The Secret Garden "shows a freedom and facility to render colour and light, which strengthened in Leech’s work from 1910 inwards, after several years of painterly development in Concarneau" (op.cit., 1993, p.166). The painting is further directly related to Leech’s "most famous work" (Anne Crookshank), Convent Garden, Brittany (fig.4, c.1912, coll. National Gallery of Ireland). Painted prior to this picture, which was first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1913, The Secret Garden must date to around 1911. Further described as "one of Leech’s most impressive works", Covent Garden, Brittany has frequently been selected as a cover image for publications such as Denise Ferran’s catalogue of the 1996-7 Retrospective and Dr. Julian Campbell’s survey of The Irish Impressionists: Irish Artists in France and Belgium, 1850-1914 (The National Gallery of Ireland, 1984). The picture has, however, been noted as suffering the same ‘contrivance’ as Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, and is described by Ferran as "in every respect a salon work". Campbell comments that the nun’s delicate profile jars with the artist's bold pattern-making compiling coiffe, robe and the lilies themselves. Her stillness is at odds with the animation of the flowers and grass, which, as in their first, fresh realisation in The Secret Garden, curl in thick glossy daubs of vivid paint, much in the manner of Van Gogh’s cypresses. Black shadows are abandoned for cobalt blue ones, the glaring noonday sun bouncing off glossy leaves. Without the need to coerce his brushwork into a pre-conceived compositional format, as is the case in Covent Garden, Brittany, Leech is seen liberated in his Secret Garden from formal studio constraints, able to unfurl his brilliant plumage as one of Ireland’s greatest colourists. In 1910 he had been elected a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy and The Secret Garden stands alone in declaring the artist’s newly discovered maturity.