Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) Image of Federico Garcia ...

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€50,000 - €80,000

Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) Image of Federico Garcia Lorca, 1978 Oil on canvas, 70 x 70cm (27½ x 27½) Signed, inscribed and dated 1978 verso Opus no. 409 Provenance: With Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Paris, label verso. In the midst of his preoccupation with images of the heads of Irish writers WB Yeats and then Joyce, Louis le Brocquy was also prompted to take on a subject further from home: the Spanish writer Federico Garcia Lorca. In the latter part of 1977 and through into the following year, the painter became engrossed in attempting a series of studies of the head of Lorca, and was drawn to make a small number of “studies in bronze of his forehead.” They were cast in bronze at the Montecatini Foundry in Italy. Le Brocquy alluded to Lorca’s lines, in his Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard, concerning a massacre in a Gypsy community: ‘Oh, city of Gypsies…/ Who could see you and forget/ Let them seek you on my brow/ The play of Moon and sand.’ The painter was aware that in taking on Lorca’s “Iberian temperament” he was facing a slightly different challenge to that posed by his own countrymen. Writing in 1979, he mentioned that it was the impassioned writing of JM Synge’s dramas that provided him with “the key to an understanding of Lorca’s fierce, lyrical world.” Subsequently, he learned that Lorca had in fact admired Synge’s writing. Like le Brocquy’s other subjects, Lorca was an extraordinary talent, whose creative imagination transcended national boundaries. Just as Joyce is regarded as quintessentially Irish and universal, so with Lorca and Spain. He fell victim to the violent cruelty of the Spanish Civil War, and he identified with outsiders in the Spanish world, the Gypsies, seeing the essence of Iberian culture in their spirit. Regarded in some respects as an outsider himself, he became in time recognised as representing the very best qualities of of that spirit. Throughout the 1970s, le Brocquy’s painterly explorations, through which he built up tenuous, speculative images in numerous overlapping layers and forays of brushwork, achieved his aim of capturing the elusive yet intense nature of the individual human consciousness, providing glimpses into the mysteries of being and creativity. Aidan Dunne, October 2024