Louis le Brocquy, H.R.H.A. b.1916

The first major retrospective of le Brocquy’s work was held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1996 under the subtitle Paintings 1939-1996. This bracket is not dictated by lack of regard for the artist’s early work, it is simply that no paintings dated prior to 1939 have previously been known to exist. (Brian Kennedy, in his 1991 survey of Irish Art and Modernism 1880-1950 suggested Southern Window, painted in Menton in 1939, as the artist’s probable first oil.) Painted when Louis was just nineteen, Sunlight in a Wood (Summer Haze) is therefore believed to be the earliest extant finished oil by the artist, the second being L'Apres Midi d'une Faun of 1937. Incongruously enough, he spent the mid-1930s studying chemistry at the Technical School, in Kevin Street, Dublin, also working at the Greenmount Oil Refinery (the family business, established by his grandfather, was the running of the small refinery at Harold’s Cross). Measuring a substantial 30 inches high and lacking obvious affiliation to any particular school, the canvas has none of the tentative nature to be expected in an untutored, early work. It is clear why the young artist should soon have felt a need to explore further afield, travelling to Europe to develop his creative potential.

Le Brocquy left Ireland to study in London in 1938. An exhibition covering several centuries of Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism had been organised by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1936-7, and it included just ten British artists (ranging from William Blake through to Ed Burra) - and no Irish ones. An International Surrealist Exhibition was also staged independently in London in 1936. Quite how it might have blown in across the Irish Sea remains a mystery, yet it would seem that the young le Brocquy was perhaps affected by this rarefied air. He was later to remark that it took him some years to recognise that a part of his attraction to Degas’ Beach Scene (Bains de Mer: Petite Fille Peignée par sa Bonne), painted circa 1898 and hanging at the Hugh Lane Gallery, was its arguably surreal nature. The flat pictorial arrangement of the 1898 work, coupled with the detached interrelation of the sitters, inspired Le Brocquy’s early A Picnic (1940, private collection). The following discussion of A Picnic could equally apply to the present work: ‘Like Degas, le Brocquy paints with a palette of predominantly neutral tones and shows great precision in the handling of line and detail within the composition. At the same time there is an element of flatness in the picture plane that renders… objects at angles and in positions that appear unreal’ (James Steward [ed.], When Time Began to Rant and Rage, Merrell Holberton, London, exhibition catalogue, 1998, p.196). Dorothy Walker has remarked that ‘there was from the very beginning a blanched look about many of his paintings: pure white light, pure white walls, pure white skin. Bone-white, chalk-white, almond-white were the adjectives that come to mind. Around the mid-1950s that whiteness, which had simply been a prevailing tonality, became the very element and substance of the paintings’ (Louis le Brocquy, Ward River Press, Dublin, 1981, p.12). Thus this eerie and compelling work, painted in such assured fashion by such a young hand, might be linked to such pivotal works as Lazarus (lot 70) and all that was to follow.

We are most grateful to Louis le Brocquy for the following additional comment: 'This was, in effect, my first attempt to paint. A few years later, under the influence of Edouard Manet, I decided it was not a painting at all. In retrospect however, I tend to see this initial work and its preoccupation with light and shade as anticipating much of my later work' (private correspondence, March 2004).