William John Leech

A Shining Palace belongs to William Leech’s most progressive and accomplished period of his career between 1903 and 1919, when he was engaged in a sustained quest for 'trying to evolve sunlight and reflections'.

Like many of his Irish predecessors, Leech had left Ireland to experience first-hand the latest artistic developments on the Continent, studying at the Académie Julian in Paris. The paintings produced over the following the years reveal this influence, employing an Impressionistic approach to painting though broken brushwork, bold colour and unconventional compositional structures. 

In the present work, the attention is not on the famous Venetian buildings, here confined to a slender upper edge of the painting although unmistakably identifiable; rather it is the play of light on the water that occupies his attention. Using a tonal, modulated palette, Leech beautifully evokes the movement of the water through free and accomplished brushwork, capturing the reflections of St Mark’s Campanile and the Doge’s Palace.

Leech had travelled in Venice and onwards to Switzerland in 1911, inspiring a body of work which was then exhibited at the Goupil Gallery in 1912, Visions of Switzerland, Venice etc. by W. J. Leech, R.H.A. The works from this period reveal Leech’s emphasis on the key elements, paring back extraneous details. As Denise Ferran writes, ‘Leech was refining the painterly technique he had developed in Concarneau from 1903 onwards, aware of Whistler's harmonies and fluidity and directness of Lavery's landscapes’ (D. Ferran, William John Leech An Irish Painter Abroad, 1996, p.56). Such sophisticated works as A Shining Palace revealed Leech’s position as one of the most pioneering painters of his generation.