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

Atelier Tabard Frères & Soeurs;
Dawson Gallery, Dublin, where purchased by the present owner c.1972

Dublin, Taylor Galleries, Louis le Brocquy, Tapisseries d'Aubusson, 9 November - 9 December 2000 (another edition).

Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, 1981, p.95, no.66 (another edition illustrated).

This tapestry is not lined. The integral woven selvedges have been turned under on the left and right sides, and over-locked with cross stitching. Some discolouration to edges of the cotton warps. There are presently five small metal hoops attached across the top edge for hanging purposes. For the future it is recommended that the piece be professionally lined and Velcro attached for hanging purposes. There is a workshop label attached to the reverse of lower left corner, with the title, number 1764, workshop and designer details noted. Woven with workshop mark lower left corner and with designer and date in the lower right corner. Weave in good overall condition. Wefts are all wool. There is no silk. There is some discolouration to the cream colours (not uncommon with this light colour of wool). The colours on the front and the reverse are different in some areas/sections. Brighter and more vibrant on the reverse. Faded and more subtle on the front. For example the cheque clothing to the right hand side figure are shades of purple on the front and are brighter raspberry/pink shades on the reverse. For example the green legs of the figure on the left and beige on the reverse, and the olive green on the front in sections is a shade of light mushroom in colour on reverse, and the turquoise green is a darker shade of mushroom on reverse. Tapestry would benefit from a light clean. Overall in good and stable condition. Balanced composition and colours, and a versatile size.
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'It is remarkable that the considerable reputation acquired by Louis le Brocquy as a designer of tapestries was early on in his career based on seven small works ... yet it is held that no artist from these islands has shown a deeper understanding of this medium than Louis le Brocquy.'
Dawson Gallery, Dublin, 1966

Woven at Aubusson by Atelier Tabard Frères et Soeurs in an edition of 9, Allegory is the third of the 'seven small works' that le Brocquy designed between 1948 and 1955, having ‘rather stumbled into by accident’ this particular form of artistic expression. Following the first Edinburgh Weavers commission of 1948, le Brocquy turned to the medium of tapestry ‘as a kind of recreation, involving completely different problems; it is refreshing in the sense that one is exhausted in a different way…’ (the artist in interview with Harriet Cooke, published in The Irish Times on 25^thMay 1973). In this new exploration, le Brocquy displayed an intuitive ability to translate painterly elements onto the flat 'insistent surface' of woven cloth, and his achievements were influential in the rebirth of the tapestry during the twentieth century.

Conceived in 1950, Allegory was ambitious both in subject matter and scale, the largest plan to date for the workshop of Tabard Frères et Soeurs. It marks a dramatic and indeed surprising departure in terms of colour, mood and feeling from the artist’s contemporary Grey Period paintings. As Dorothy Walker in her monograph on the artist has explained, the delineation of the figures and the harlequin patterns relate directly back to the celebratory influence of Picasso. However, the more general surface pattern, with its overlapping planes and interlocking forms, points instead to the powerful stylistic – and conceptual – influence of Jean Lurçat, the key tapestry revivalist of the twentieth century.

In his 1956 essay on Lurçat, le Brocquy explained his mentor’s ‘central conviction’ concerning the inter-relation of all matter. He recounted how, ‘sitting in my London studio recently he [Lurçat] enlarged on this theme, carefully discovering the small, golden reflections and broken shadows which his glass of whisky cast around it. Books, table, papers, trouser leg, even the rush matting on the floor, were decorated by its presence, proclaiming for him the woven interdependence of all things’ (quoted in Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Ward River Press, Dublin, p.30). In this same essay le Brocquy commended Lurçat’s ‘own highly particular display of age-old symbols. Here, on an unfolding surface, the sun and his herald, the cock, once more proclaim with pagan fervour the potency of natural life, while man and dog alike are in life, in death, related to the leaves’.

Although le Brocquy’s own Allegory design is clearly indebted to Lurçat and the idiom is far removed from his concurrent work in oil, the subject matter itself can nevertheless be reconciled with that of the paintings. By 1950, the artist had begun to find pictorial form for the existential anxieties of the moment. Le Brocquy has spoken of how, ‘in these post-war, Cold War days, we all of us walked in fear of potential nuclear disaster obliterating civilization’ (quoted by Alistair Smith, Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939-1996, Irish Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalogue, 1996, p.36). In ancient times, abstract concepts of life and death, time and timelessness were represented in narrative or pictorial form using character and symbols. These concepts are those that le Brocquy has been deeply concerned with throughout his artistic career, the duration of which has been characterised by an ongoing quest for quintessential, irreducible symbols.

With this tapestry, le Brocquy drew attention to the allegorical form and its relevance to modern existence. In Allegory, the sun, the moon, and the skein of wool all chronicle the passage of time, while the ethereal child 'speaks for the lost children of post-war Europe who wondered through this cruel work with wonder and half-understanding' (James White, Contemporary Irish Artists (VI): Louis le Brocquy, Envoy, vol.2, no.6, Dublin, 6 May 1950, p. 59). His interpretation of the theme in tapestry form has, moreover, become one of the key works upon which his international reputation as a tapestry designer now rests.