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

The undisputed hero of The Tain, Cuchulainn became an ongoing theme for le Brocquy after he was first commissioned to illustrate Thomas Kinsella's translation in 1967. le Brocquy explained that in the Cuchulainn series he had 'tried to produce a sort of group of mass emergence of human presence, features uncertain - merely shadowed blobs or patches - but vaguely analogous perhaps in terms of woven colour to the weathered, enduring stone boss-heads of Clonfert or Entremont - or of Dysert O'Dea...' (Louis le Brocquy, quoted in Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Dublin 1981, p.51).