Image of Francis Bacon, 1979
Watercolour, 61 x 46 cm
Sotheby's, London, Irish Sale, 24 October, 2007
Sold 153,600 GBP- €229,000
EXHIBITED
 Paris, Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Louis le Brocquy, November - December 1979, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue; New York, New York State Department, Louis le Brocquy and the Celtic Head Image, September - November 1981, no.98, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue;Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Louis le Brocquy, October 1982, no.78. Although le Brocquy first met Bacon in London in the 1950s, it was not until the year of the present work, 1979, that he created his first images of the artist. Bacon even wrote the introduction to le Brocquy's 1966 retrospective at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and aptly observed, '...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 possibilties of inventing ways by which fact and appearance can be reconjugated'. Sotheby’s first ever stand alone sale of Irish post war and Contemporary art exceeded all expectations today, realizing a total of €1,332,415 (£893,520) – a sum well in excess of the pre-sale high estimate. New auctions records were established for 26 artists in a sale which saw many works sell for prices double and triple their high estimates. Arabella Bishop and Frances Christie, specialists in charge of the sale, said: “We are thrilled with the fantastic results. Following a great reception of the sale’s travelling exhibition to both Dublin and Belfast, we were especially pleased to see so much interest from collectors in London as well as from the Continent and the United States, many of whom have rarely come into contact with Irish art before. Bidding activity was truly international – and perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the mix we saw today was the collectors from other fields (Modern British, International Contemporary and Jewellery for instance) who entered the fray today.” New auction records were established for 26 artists today. As well as records for two of Ireland’s most esteemed living artists, Basil Blackshaw and Louis le Brocquy, records were also set for Contemporary artists such as John Noel Smith, Brian Maguire, Sean Shanahan, Elizabeth Magill, and Ciaran Lennon. The younger generation also performed exceptionally well, with records set for artists such as Darren Murray, Ian Charlesworth, Diana Copperwhite, Simon McWilliams and Colin Davidson.
St udy for A Family, 1951
Pen & Watercolour, 15" x 18" (38 x 45.7cm)
Devers's, Dublin, 12 June 2007
Sold €196,620 (excluding ARR)
Lovers, 1951
Coloured chalks and washes, 71 x 50 cm
Sotheby's, London, The Irish Sale, 13 May 2005
Sold 131,200 GBP - €194,983
 Painted in 1951, Lovers firmly belongs to a brief period of works executed from 1951-1954 known as the 'grey period'. It was in the same year that le Brocquy also produced one of his earliest masterpieces; A Family (oil on canvas, National Gallery of Ireland) which was first exhibited in London in 1951 and which was included in the Irish room at the 1956 Venice Biennale. The intimacy of the two Lovers is conspicuous in relation to the members of A Family and the couple act as a direct antithesis to the main protaganists of the latter work who are clearly isolated from each other and more obviously turned directly away from each other. The Lovers appear to be more related to the child on the far right of A Family both in the compassion of their facial features and in their more optimistic outlook. This notion is enchanced by the colourful bouquet of flowers punctuating the upper left corner which, as the only incidence of colour in the entire composition, is naturally suggestive of a more hopeful future. However, as Alistair Smith has proposed, the bouquet also serves to remind us of the more melancholic qualities embued in le Brocquy's grey period works as the bouquet is related to funerary ritual and thus, ultimately, to death (see Alistair Smith, Louis le Brocquy, Paintings 1939 - 1996, exh.cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1996-1997, p.33). As such, Lovers becomes an integral part of Le Brocquy's on-going commentary on the nature of humanity. The grey period works in particular are suffused with Le Brocquy's own complex preoccupations with the familial unit and with human relationships in general where the individual, in this case, a pair of individuals, are entrapped by the restrictions and regulations of modern urban society. Stylistically, Lovers follows on from the analytical cubist lessons learnt from Picasso in the 1940s. However, the tone of the present work stands in stark contrast to the vibrant palette of his tinker series (see for example, lots 94 and 96). In Lovers, the monochromatic palette is not only symbolic of underlying melancholy but also serves to sharpen le Brocquy's exploration of the human form. Here, the male and female figures have been reduced to their bare minimum so that with an absolute ecomony of detail, a bold and stylized image is produced that is clearly le Brocquy's own modern take on the human figure.
Tinkers Enter the City, 1946
pen and ink and watercolour, 23 by 29cm.; 9 by 11½in.
Sotheby's, London, 11 May 2006
Sold 78,000 GBP
 le Brocquy was instantly captivated by the vitality of the travelling people he first came across in 1945 outside Tullamore in Co.Offaly. He became fascinated by their culture, ritual and language and subsequently spent long periods of 1946 with them recording their everyday way of life. It is highly likely that the present work was executed in situ before the artist moved to London in 1946; a move perhaps implied by the title of the present work. Here, the tinkers form a lively procession across the centre of the composition which is punctuated by city life; street-vendors, shop-keepers and passers-by surround the energetic ‘outsiders’ as they embrace the hustle and bustle of urban existence. The buoyancy of line and slightly fractured representation of form denotes Le Brocquy's knowledge of analytical and synthetic cubism which he would have seen first hand at Picasso's exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in 1945. The angular features of the characters developed into the cubist inspired forms of his Tinker series masterpiece Travelling Woman with Newspaper (1947, sold in these rooms, 18th May 2000, lot 158). Within a wider context, the vitality manifested in the present work represents more general attitudes championing local ways of existence at the time. J.M. Synge had already documented the islanders in his The Aran Islands and J.B. Yeats found every excuse to record life in the west of Ireland. Indeed, Manet, one of Le Brocquy's formative influences, had always had a fascination for the bohemian life of the Spanish gypsies. In a more British context, Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood spent the late 1920s eschewing the life and art of the 'untaught' mariner, Alfred Wallis who exemplified what they perceived as the idyllic way of life, untainted by the developments of modern urban and settled society.
Study. Man with Towl, 1951
Watercolour, gouache and coloured chalks, 112 by 71cm., 44 by 28in.
Sotheby's London, 16 May 2003
Sold 62,400 GBP
 Executed in 1951, Study (Man with Towel) belongs in the early part of le Brocquy's `Grey Period'. Yet it also heralds, pictorially and conceptually, the artist's imminent, and thereafter ongoing, exploration into the human condition. Standing beneath a rudimentary overhead lamp, a nude man bows his head. Arms extended, he holds up behind him a piece of white fabric, creating for himself a sort of photographic backdrop. The lightbulb is a familiar prop in le Brocquy's early work - it appears in the Condemned Man of 1945 (private collection) and, more famously, in his magnum opus of the Grey period, The Family (coll. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) also painted in 1951. On both occasions this product of modern technology serves to illuminate an oppressive, cell-like environment, within which it simultaneously manages to illuminate the gross shortfallings of man's spiritual progress. In the present composition, the symbol of a faltering modern society is juxtaposed with one of the most enduring gestures of the visual language. The man's pose is unmistakeably that of the Crucifixion. It is a motif that le Brocquy returns to time and again, most memorably with Lazarus (1954, sold in these rooms 18th May 2000, lot 161) - for which the present work may have been used as a study - but also in some of the most recent of his compositions (see for example Human Image, lot 138). In this context, it is also easy to propose an analogy for the white towel as a sort of burial shroud. However, it is not the specifics of the religious imagery that are important. As John Berger explained in 1955 (New Statesman, February 1955): `The theme of all of [le Brocquy's Grey Period paintings] - even if some of them are called Lazarus or Resurrection - is the same. It is - and there is no way of putting it briefly except in a platitude - the mystery of the flesh: the nearness within the nervous system of pain and pleasure: the ambiguity of the body as a cage containing an animal and the body as an expendable servant of the heart: the fact that the same muscles move in the shoulder whether the arm is raised to caress or to do violence' (quoted by Alistair Smith, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Louis le Brocquy: Paintings 1939-1996, 1996, p.33). With the present, early work, the muscles under consideration are clearly delineated according to the artist's then current practice. It took another five years for le Brocquy's exploration of the body as cage to take on the more abstract and elemental pictorial form of the Presences and the Human Images. Study (Man with Towel) is nevertheless a pivotal image. It announces the forthcoming move away from the narrative rhetoric and the group compositions towards the exclusive concentration on the single human entity as an irreducible symbol. In this way, the present important and formative work points the way forward to everything that le Brocquy has since acheived.
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