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

Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris, where purchased by a private collector in December 1979
Their sale, Sotheby's London, 24th October 2006, lot 68
Private Collection

Paris, Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Louis le Brocquy, 1979 (details untraced);
New York, New York State Department, Louis le Brocquy and the Celtic Head Image, 26th September - 29th November 1981, cat. no.98;
Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Louis le Brocquy, 23rd October - 28th November 1982, cat. no.78.

The sheet appears to be sound and the work in excellent overall condition. Held under glass in a white wooden box frame; unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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'Louis le Brocquy belongs to a category of artists who have always existed - obsessed by figuration outside and on the other side of illustration - who are aware of the vast and potent possibilities of inventing ways by which fact and appearance can be conjugated.'
(Francis Bacon’s introduction to le Brocquy’s retrospective exhibition at The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, 1966)

Louis le Brocquy and Francis Bacon had a close friendship, and shared much in common with their Irish background and the nature of their work. They met in the 1950s and maintained a commitment to figurative painting at a time when abstraction was the driving movement. As Dorothy Walker wrote: ‘he [le Brocquy] pursued his own preoccupation, as Francis Bacon did his, and their continued isolation as figurative painters in an abstract world no doubt helped to strengthen their interest in each other’s work’ (Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, 1981, p.28).

Something of this isolation is felt in the present work, which belongs to le Brocquy’s celebrated Portrait Head series depicting Ireland’s literary and artistic figures. The series commenced circa 1975 and continued throughout his career. Together with the Ancestral Head series that preceded it, le Brocquy had an overriding concern to explore the human spirit and Ireland’s Celtic and artistic culture, past and present. In the group of le Brocquy’s paintings titled Head with Open Mouth from 1974, it is hard to resist the parallels with the anguished heads of Bacon’s Pope paintings.

Le Brocquy had always been an accomplished watercolourist, and here the skill of his technique, thin washes worked up with dabs of colour, allows these ‘heads’ to take on a powerful and mythical presence. As Anne Crookshank commented: ‘the traces of paper left between each stroke, which enhance the brilliancy of the colours, and the gleam of whiteness, which glows through the paint, all help to create the truly magical effect of images coagulating in front of your eyes, coming alive, mediating, speaking, and ultimately returning to their own imaginative genius’.