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LEFT: Sunlight in a Wood a.k.a Summer Haze, 1935, oil on canvas. FAR LEFT: Louis le Brocquy in his studio. BELOW: A Family, 1951, oil on canvas. Collection National Gallery of Ireland. BELOW CENTER: Image of W.B. Yeats, 1975, oil on canvas.
reach a little into the meaning of life.” My own introduction to the paintings of Louis le Brocquy goes back to 1978, when I was awarded an IIE scholarship to attend Exeter College, Oxford. At some point during my stay, and I can't remember exactly where, I saw a poster advertising an exhibition of works by Louis le Brocquy À la recherche de W. B. Yeats: Cent Portraits Imaginaires (In Search of W.B. Yeats: Imaginary Head Portraits) October-November 1976, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. The exhibition was over, but I was reading Yeats' A Vision at the time and fortunately was not too late to buy the poster of Yeats, which I still possess. But even though I was taken by le Brocquy's work and his “Head Images” in particular, I had no idea who this Irish master with the French name was. As I found out, Louis le Brocquy was born in Dublin on November 10, 1916. The son of Albert le Brocquy, the honorary secretary of the Irish League of Nations Society, and Sybil (née Staunton), co-founder of Amnesty International Ireland and a noted figure within Dublin's literary circles. His family was friendly with W.B. Yeats and family, which may account for his perfervid interest in Yeats.
Le Brocquy was educated at St. Gerard's School, Co. Wicklow, and in 1934 went on to study chemistry at Kevin Street Technical School, and then Trinity College Dublin. At the same time, his childhood interest in art, particularly painting, re-emerged, and he produced two early experimental paintings, both of which were accepted for exhibition by the Royal Hibernian Academy – an impressive accomplishment for a young, selftaught amateur. According to le Brocquy's wife and biographer, Anne Madden, the summer of 1938 marked the time when le Brocquy the chemistry student first considered becoming le Brocquy the painter.
That November, subsequent to graduation from Trinity, le Brocquy left Ireland to immerse himself in studying the great European art collections of London's National Gallery, the Louvre in Paris and the Prado Collection on loan to Geneva. By 1940 he had returned to Ireland, where his work began to get attention. Throughout a career spanning over seven decades and many ground-breaking stylistic manifestations, le Brocquy has become internationally recognized as one of the foremost Irish painters of the 20th century. In 2002, his seminal 1951 work, A Family, was added to the Permanent Irish Collection of the National Gallery of Ireland, making him the first and only living artist to be included in the collection. The “Head Images” of literary figures for which he is so famous began in 1964, with portraits of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and in 1975 he began the aforementioned series on W.B. Yeats. In 1964, le Brocquy had begun the fouth distinctive phase of his artistic career, with a series of images called Ancestral Heads. Inspired by decorated Polynesian skulls on display at Musée de l’homme in Paris, he began to consider the JUNE / JULY 2011 IRISH AMERICA 55