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

Dublin, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 1978;
New York, New York State Museum, Louis le Brocquy and the Celtic Head Image, 26 September - 29 November 1981, with tour to Boston and Westfield, no.78, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue;
Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Louis le Brocquy, 23 October - 28 November 1982, probably no.44, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue;
Dublin, Guinness Hop Store, Louis le Brocquy, Images of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Federico Garcia Lorca, Picasso, Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, 1975 - 1987, September - October 1987, with tour to Belfast, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane, no.14, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue.

Original canvas in excellent original condition. Under ultraviolet light, there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in its original stained wood box frame under glass; unexamined out of frame.
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'...Ever since I rediscovered for myself the image of the head, I have painted studies of James Joyce. I have never known Joyce but I am bound to him as a Dubliner...' (le Brocquy, 1979, quoted in Louis le Brocquy Portrait Heads, exh.cat., National Gallery of Ireland, 4 November 2006 - 14 January 2007, p.62).

James Joyce (1882 - 1941) was undoubtedly one of le Brocquy's most enigmatic and compelling subjects. Although they never met, le Brocquy was magnetically drawn to Joyce both as an intriguing artistic subject and to his writing in its own right. le Brocquy himself was born in the same year that Joyce published Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916) and he therefore grew up in a city that was inextricably linked to Joyce's field of references and descriptions.

le Brocquy's treatment of Joyce resulted in arguably the most intense creative experience of all his portrait head subjects. On the one hand, he was fasincated by Joyce's distincitve physical features; his 'unique boat-shaped head - the raised poop of the forehead, the jutting bone of the jaw' and yet on the other hand, he felt 'a fear perhaps of re-entering into certain painful aspects of his temperament, of his unending difficulties' (le Brocquy, ibid, p.62). It is precisedly this counterpoint between Joyce's bold physical traits and his entirely elusive emotional personality that make him such a challenging subject and the complex dialectic between the two have inspired some of the most powerful images of the artist's career.