Louis Le Brocquy

Louis Le Brocquy was born in Dublin in 1916 to Irish parents. He studied chemistry at Trinity College in Dublin, and until 1938 worked in the family business. He then moved to London and Paris, and educated himself through the study of paintings at the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery and the Louvre. Today Le Brocquy is one of the most widely known and celebrated of all living Irish artists. His early works were painted in the 19th century naturalist style. By 1945 his central theme had become the life of the wandering tinkers of Ireland, and he explored how the characteristic freedom and independence of the artist closely resembled the nature of the tinker's life. Le Brocquy once stated that "For me, the Travelling People represented dramatically perhaps, the human condition." Wandering dispossessed people had come to symbolize the plight of humanity itself, and certainly in post-war Europe, the vast numbers of refugees bore stark witness to this thesis. It is interesting that Irish poet John Millington Synge also saw travelers and artists as fringe groups of society, and frequently referred to the spiritual bond between them. In Tinkers Enter the City, Le Brocquy portrays a flat but highly coloured and dynamic scene. Each individual occupies his own space, separate and isolated - both pictorially and psychologically. Yet as a painting it functions as a whole unit, drawn together in a perfect balance of form and colour. The approach is highly original, but at the same time conveys a deep understanding of the lessons of contemporary French art. This small series of paintings from the late 1940s is the only time that the artist used bright harlequin colours to convey his vision. Another painting in this series entitled Travelling Woman with Newspaper was exhibited in 1949 at a British Arts Council exhibition in Amsterdam. These paintings bear a striking resemblance to de Kooning's later paintings of women, and it is tempting to postulate that de Kooning was influenced by this period of Le Brocquy's work.