Gerard Dillon

Christie's, Dublin, 24 October 1988, lot 473

Dublin, Irish Exhibition of Living Art, 1956, no.36; 
Sheffield, Graves Gallery, Contemporary Art in Ulster, 1957, no.25;
Dublin, Royal Hibernian Academy, A Free Spirit: Irish Art 1860-1960, in association with Pyms Gallery, London, June-July 1990, no.89

Kenneth McConkey, A Free Spirit: Irish Art 1860-1960, 1990, illustrated p.218

The board appears to be in sound and stable order and the work in good original condition. UV light inspection reveals no evidence of any retouching or restoration. Held in a painted wooden box frame.
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We are grateful to Karen Reihill for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work. 

The iconography of Gerard Dillon’s West of Ireland paintings has become perhaps the most celebrated of his career. In his naïve painting style, his depictions of the people and their landscape, far removed from the urban environments of Belfast and London where he lived, are rendered with extraordinary vitality and freshness. The discovery of Connemara was the most important development of Dillon’s life and of the 20^th century Irish painters who also became enraptured with the West (notably Northern), such as Paul Henry, James Humbert Craig or Charles Lamb, Dillon’s paintings are the most original and intuitive. They possess an innocence - evoked in his free-spirited painting style - that conjures up the romance of this land which resonated with the artist so strongly.

Dillon developed a unique pictorial language to capture the essence of life in the West, which at its most successful moved beyond simply reportage, albeit poetically, such as Lobster Pots (private collection) to a synthesis of land, people and community that was profound, such as West of Ireland Landscape (c.1945, National Gallery of Ireland). Human forms and references to ways of life typical of the place become absorbed into the pattern of the landscape, bordered by the meandering stone walls that decorate the land.

In the present work, Dillon divides the picture plane in three, with the men in the foreground cut into the landscape in which they toil. The layers of the earth form a patchwork of colours behind them, reflected further in the quilt-like landscape that stretches into the distance, upon which large peat stacks stand. Off the coast in the distance, the faint shape of an island can be made out, perhaps Inishlacken off Roundstone.

The device of subsuming the men into the bog is a symbolic placement that ties in with a rich thread of Irish art where the bog, as more recently explored in the poetry of Seamus Heaney in works such as The Tollund Man and Bogland, is seen as a 'preserver and embalmer of a long forgotten culture. It is the earth whence humanity sprang and to which it will return - the womb and the grave.' (K. McConkey, op. cit., p.218) As an artist acutely aware of his mortality, Dillon appears to identify with these three figures. Strikingly, the compositional structure anticipates one of Dillon’s most poignant and complex works, The Brothers (1965), in which the skeletons of his three brothers are seen buried in the ground while above them kneels Dillon’s pictorial alter-ego, a pierrot.

Three Men in a Bog represents the unique visual language Dillon developed at its most successful, a symbolic and harmonious composition that also balances colour, form and design without being staged or trite. As such, the painting exemplifies the very best of Dillon’s work and his major contribution to Irish art and cultural history in the 20^th century.