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

The present work is a study for le Brocquy’s seminal landscape of the same title (Private Collection). Executed in 1944, Famine Cottages, Connemara is one of his earliest works to demonstrate the influence of cubism and significantly marks the fundamental stylistic change from the traditional nature of his work in the early 1940s (see for example, Girl in White, 1941, Ulster Museum, Belfast) to the avant-garde approach that has become a trademark of his oeuvre. 

He first went to paint in Connemara in the early 1940s on the recommendation of his friend Ernán O’Malley and was immediately struck by the way of life he found there.  Crucially, O’Malley was the first to write a critical appreciation of le Brocquy’s work which was published in Horizon in 1946 and he specifically picked out Famine Cottages Connemara and its ‘white washed cottages, abandoned in the Great Famine of 1848, indefinite now in reduced form as hollow wind-worn shells, slowly sink back into the soil from which they have come… Shawled women jut out of darker paint passages in the foreground as if they were worn stone shapes…’ (O’Malley, 1946, quoted in A.Smith, Louis le Brocquy, Paintings 1939 – 1996, exh.cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, 16 October 1996 – 16 February 1997, p.77).