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Artist: Louis Le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012) Title: Being (1998) (W1430) Signature: signed and dated 'Le Brocquy 98' lower right Medium: watercolour on paper Size: 60 x 45cm (23.6 x 17.7in) Framed Size: 82.5 x 66.4cm (32.5 x 26.1in) Provenance: The Nicholas Gallery, Belfast (label verso); These rooms, 20th July 2020 lot 62 where purchased by the present owner a#morebtn { color: #de1d01; } a#morebtn:hover { cursor: pointer;} In the 1950s and '60s, Louis le Brocquy devised a new way of painting the individual human presence. Many streams of inspiration fed into his novel approach, including the experiences of his partner and wife Anne Madden, who underwent spinal surgery, and the Celtic cult that envisaged the human head... Read more Louis Le Brocquy Lot 46 - 'Being (1998) (W1430)' Estimate: €15,000 - €20,000 In the 1950s and '60s, Louis le Brocquy devised a new way of painting the individual human presence. Many streams of inspiration fed into his novel approach, including the experiences of his partner and wife Anne Madden, who underwent spinal surgery, and the Celtic cult that envisaged the human head as a magic container of the spirit. Le Brocquy engaged in a kind of spiritual archaeology, conjuring up a sense of individual consciousness from the depths of time and space. This is an archetypal example of his achievement. In the years after World War II, nearly all of Louis le Brocquy's paintings were inspired by a small number of themes, based on the human figure. The earliest theme was traveling people. This was followed by the series based on 'the Family', and then by the 'Procession', and 'Children in a Wood', paintings. In the mid 1950s, he commenced work on a series of almost completely non-figurative 'Presence' paintings. These were followed by still-lives, then 'Ancestral Heads' and in 1964 he began work on an extensive series of imagined portraits of writers such as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, that continued up to the late 1990s. In Post-war London, when le Brocquy first began to show work at the Gimpel Fils Gallery, abstract painting had become the dominant art form, and figurative artists such as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and le Brocquy were regarded as out of step. le Brocquy's admiration for the watercolours of Cezanne is evident in this painting Being which dates from 1998. The art critic Adrian Stokes noted that the figures in Cezanne's paintings were partly absorbed into their environment, and this is clear also in le Brocquy's watercolour where the figure, fragmented and frozen in movement, dematerialises and becomes interwoven into the background. Following Cezanne's example, le Brocquy depicted his figures as though they were low-relief sculptures on an antique sarcophagus. He emphasised relief through using warm 'advancing' colours, juxtaposed against cool 'receding' colours, rather than by simply adding black. Another characteristic of le Brocquy's painting, and pictorial sense, is his use of white, deriving in part from an admiration for Manet. His 'Presence' paintings, and his images of heads, are often set in a field of white, implying transcendence. Peter Murray, March 2023