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

le Brocquy was instantly captivated by the vitality of the travelling people he first came across in 1945 outside Tullamore in Co.Offaly. He became fascinated by their culture, ritual and language and subsequently spent long periods of 1946 with them recording their everyday way of life. It is highly likely that the present work was executed in situ before the artist moved to London in 1946; a move perhaps implied by the title of the present work. Here, the tinkers form a lively procession across the centre of the composition which is punctuated by city life; street-vendors, shop-keepers and passers-by surround the energetic ‘outsiders’ as they embrace the hustle and bustle of urban existence.

The buoyancy of line and slightly fractured representation of form denotes Le Brocquy's knowledge of analytical and synthetic cubism which he would have seen first hand at Picasso's exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in 1945. The angular features of the characters developed into the cubist inspired forms of his Tinker series masterpiece Travelling Woman with Newspaper (1947, sold in these rooms, 18th May 2000, lot 158).

Within a wider context, the vitality manifested in the present work represents more general attitudes championing local ways of existence at the time. J.M. Synge had already documented the islanders in his The Aran Islands and J.B. Yeats found every excuse to record life in the west of Ireland. Indeed, Manet, one of Le Brocquy's formative influences, had always had a fascination for the bohemian life of the Spanish gypsies. In a more British context, Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood spent the late 1920s eschewing the life and art of the 'untaught' mariner, Alfred Wallis who exemplified what they perceived as the idyllic way of life, untainted by the developments of modern urban and settled society.