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

Atelier René Duché, 1999, ed.1/9

Atelier René Duché;
de Veres, Dublin, 25 November 2003, lot 102, where purchased by the present owner

Dublin, Taylor Galleries, Louis le Brocquy, Aubusson Tapestries, 9 November - 9 December 2000, illustrated (another edition);
London, Agnew's, Louis le Brocquy, Aubusson Tapestries, 3 - 29 May 2001, illustrated on the front cover (another edition)

Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, 1981, no.64, p.95, illustrated (another edition)

This tapestry is in very good overall condition. Bright, vibrant and balanced colours. The blue ground is not pure blue but includes black. It has an outer woven selvedge. It has been lined with unbleached (wrinkled) calico and has tape and Velcro across the top for hanging purposes. The tapestry is woven with Le Brocquy, 1950, in the lower left corner. The manufactory label is attached to the lining on the reverse of the lower edge. Very striking tapestry, of versatile size.
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 'Apart from a few of Lurcat's [Jean Lurcat, principal tapestry revivalist of the twentieth century who influenced le Brocquy], it is the most successful tapestry I have seen and a superb latter-day example of the Celtic art of surface decoration' (quoted in Walker, Louis le Brocquy, 1981, p.29).

Le Brocquy ventured into the medium of tapestry at the end of the 1940s, developing a central interest that paralleled his painting. He had been invited in 1948 (alongside other artists who included Stanley Spencer and Graham Sutherland) to design tapestries by the Edinburgh Tapestry Weavers, and continued in the medium in collaboration with the Tabard workshop at Aubusson in France. The Garlanded Goat, made in 1950,  was his second and one of his best known designs. The goat is the embodiment of the pagan, leering King Puck, hero of the ancient Puck Fair at Killorglin, Co. Kerry. Robert Melville wrote of it: 'Apart from a few of Lurcat's [Jean Lurcat, principal tapestry revivalist of the twentieth century who influenced le Brocquy], it is the most successful tapestry I have seen and a superb latter-day example of the Celtic art of surface decoration' (quoted in Walker, Louis le Brocquy, 1981, p.29).

The present tapestry is a colour-inverted version of the 1950 one, woven at Aubusson in 1999 under the direction of René Duché, a master Lissier and the award-winning Meilleur Ouvrier de France in 1991. It was exhibited at the Taylor Galleries in 2000 alongside further colour-inverted versions of his Travellers and Eden series from 1948-52. Discussing these works in the catalogue for the Taylor Galleries exhibition, le Brocquy explained: 'My excitement regarding the drama of colour-inversion encouraged me to make at the time second versions of these linear cartoons, inverted both in colour and tone. I have had to wait some fifty years before these colour-inverted cartoons could be woven at Aubusson by the great Lissier Reneé Duché who in collaboration with my son Pierre, has at last enabled me to realise their inverted transformation of mood, "as contrary as night from day"'.

These tapestries are a remarkable testament to le Brocquy's investigation into colour. As Mark Adams in the foreward of the 2001 Agnew's exhibition catalogue wrote: 'le Brocquy makes it clear that the present tapestries are not counterparts in any sense of the pieces of the 1950s and 1960s, which share their compositions. The two sets of works, opposites in colour and tone, are integral parts of a single, greater project, planned fifty years ago and finally brought to completion'.