Patrick Swift (1927-1983) Positano Oil on canvas, 76 x 51c...

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€8,000 - €12,000

Patrick Swift (1927-1983) Positano Oil on canvas, 76 x 51cm (28 x 20) Exhibited: Dublin, 1993, Irish Museum of Modern Art label verso, Belfast, Ulster Museum One of the best and most interesting Irish painters of the 20th century, Patrick Swift was also an exceptionally free spirit, something that resulted in his relative obscurity on the Irish cultural scene for a long time, despite the consistent advocacy of some formidable commentators, notably the writer Anthony Cronin, who never doubted his significance. It didn’t help, of course, that Swift spend much of his life abroad, in London for most of the 1950s and, from 1962, in Portugal, where he settled. He also spent time in Paris and about a year in Italy during the 1950s. For the latter part of his Italian residency, in early 1955, he was in Positano, and this exceptionally fine painting dates from that time. No matter where he was, Swift was always drawn to trees, and the dramatic, bristling arcs of the foregrounded palm, probably a date palm, take pride of place in this composition, its exuberant energy cleverly contained by the right-angled grid of the town’s buildings behind, before the eye leaps on to the freedom of the soaring mountainside beyond with its intricate latticework of rock, trees and other vegetation. From the heat of the town, we are skilfully guided towards the breezy, airy summit. Hugely energetic and enterprising, Swift straddled the artistic and literary scenes in Dublin (he founded the journal X during his time in London). He studied at NCAD and, an immediately accomplished painter, established a studio in Dublin. Lucian Freud stayed there when he visited the city and there is a notable synergy between the work of the two at the time. Swift’s precise, probing mode of realism was also an acknowledged influence on painter Edward Maguire. Swift was opposed to abstraction, which he saw as being in the ascendant in the 1950s, but he was an extremely adventurous representational painter, open to many possibilities. His settling in Portugal was partly a way of focussing more intently on his own work, away from the pressure of prevailing orthodoxies. In 1968 he opened a traditional Portuguese pottery with fellow painter Lima de Freites while continuing to paint and exhibit. Following his relatively early death in 1983, there were moves to explore his artistic legacy, eventually resulting in fine retrospectives at IMMA and Cork’s Crawford Gallery. Aidan Dunne, February 2025