Few artists in this country have been as feted during their lifetimes as Louis Le Brocquy, and yet Thursday's news that one of his pictures - Travelling Woman with Newspaper, painted more than half a century ago - had been sold by Sotheby's for a record £1.158 million sterling was perhaps the greatest honour he could receive.
As a rule, the amount paid for Irish art only rises significantly in value after the artist responsible has died and is no longer able to enjoy any of the benefits that inevitably accrue from such an improvement in the market. In Le Brocquy's case, the highest sum previously made for one of his works, three years ago, was a mere tenth of that achieved on Thursday.
Even so, he has always somewhat bucked the trend whereby the price of paintings rises posthumously; certainly from the 1960s onwards his importance in Ireland's artistic hierarchy has been widely appreciated and he assumed the mantle held earlier in the century by Jack Yeats of Ireland's greatest living artist.
In Le Brocquy's case, this title is as lightly carried as has been its literary equivalent by his friend, Seamus Heaney.
Now aged 83, the painter may also lay claim to being Ireland's most charming artist, a modest and self-deprecating man who consistently seems surprised at the attention he and his work deservedly receive. It is characteristic of his temperament that when told of the price made by Travelling Woman he should have professed himself "utterly and totally flabbergasted" before going on to express a hope that the sale would "raise the profile of Irish art generally".
For many years, that profile was sustained almost single-handedly by Le Brocquy, who has been among the few Irish artists in the second half of the 20th century with an international reputation.
In part this may be because he has spent a great deal of time outside Ireland; although maintaining homes here, for the past 30 years he and his artist wife, Anne Madden, have lived and worked in the south of France. Only next week do they return to make this country their permanent base.
Le Brocquy is that relatively rare phenomenon, the cosmopolitan Irishman who in his work combines local references with a keen understanding of the international art world. Travelling Woman eloquently demonstrates this combination. Painted in the mid-1940s, its cubist style reflects the time spent by Le Brocquy in Europe before the second World War and, in particular, his study of Picasso during this period. Although painted in London, it is totally Irish in inspiration and spirit.
One of a series of pictures produced by Le Brocquy after he had encountered a group of travellers outside Tullamore, Co Offaly, in 1945, the painting was immediately recognised as a milestone in his development and he has cited it as among the four early works which will define his lasting legacy.
At the time of its production, he had just begun to earn a living from his work and was being widely described as "the artist who never had a lesson". Having been born and raised in Dublin (his surname comes from a Belgian great-grandfather), Le Brocquy arranged his own artistic education by leaving Ireland for France in 1938.
"Example is a pretty good teacher," he said four years ago. After spending the war years here, he soon departed again, this time for Britain.
If his pictures are now highly prized in this country, that was by no means always the case; in 1951 one of his paintings, A Family, was offered by the Friends of the National Collections to Dublin's Municipal Art Gallery, which rejected it.
FIVE years later the same work won a major prize at the Venice Biennale. By then, Le Brocquy had begun to evolve his own, highly distinctive style, just as unique as that of Jack Yeats before him.
He has declared: "I have obviously studied the art of the past very closely." But the references are not necessarily so obvious.
Le Brocquy says he has been influenced by sources as diverse as Giacometti and Byzantine mosaics, as well as his friend Francis Bacon, whose own art will be celebrated with a major exhibition in Dublin at the end of this month. But for several decades, every Le Brocquy picture has possessed its own character which, like the man, is at once alluring and mysterious.
While appreciating abstraction, he has always been a figurative artist and is best known today for his portraits celebrating major creative figures of the 20th century such as Beckett, Yeats and Joyce. These are cultural icons, and therefore Le Brocquy's interpretation of their heads possesses an unquestionably iconic authority.
So, too, does he, as is proved by the price achieved this week for his Travelling Woman.
robyrne@irish-times.ie