An Arthur Armstrong surprise

Studio sales are rare in Ireland, and probably rare anywhere today; works left behind by an artist's death are more likely to go on exhibition at his/her gallery posthumously, or to turn up miscellaneously in art auctions, or simply to be dissipated in one way or another. So the event scheduled for the National Concert Hall in Dublin this afternoon is an unusual one - the studio sale of the late Arthur Armstrong RHA, who died in 1996. Armstrong (born in 1924) was the last surviving member of a highly interesting group of Northern painters who were among the vanguard of Irish art in the postwar years. They included Gerard Dillon, George Campbell and Daniel O'Neill, whose pictures are now eagerly sought after in the auction room and are included in all the better public collections in this country. Dillon, Campbell and O'Neill are all associated with the Victor Waddington Gallery and the best decade of the now-vanished Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Armstrong, who was younger than the others, rather stood apart in that he came just too late to be a Waddington artist (the great dealer moved to London in 1957).However, he was closely involved with them all, personally and artistically, and with Campbell in particular. Armstrong did not have an easy climb as a painter. Born in Carrickfergus, for several years he worked in the Belfast Gas Office as the chief support of his widowed mother, before he broke away and decided to paint full time. Northern Ireland, however, did not offer a full-time living to many painters, so in the 1950s he was forced to emigrate to London. Here he teamed up with Dillon and Campbell, who had been there for several years, living as lodgers in the house of Dillon's sister where Armstrong joined them. But London in the depressed 1950s was already overcrowded with artists from all countries and rather understocked with buyers, so that Armstrong was forced to work part-time to keep going.His elder colleagues did not have it easy either; at one stage they were reduced to hanging their pictures on park railings, as part of open-air exhibitions organised by groups of Sunday painters and a sprinkling of professionals. It was a period in which many people were glad to fall back on the social welfare benefits which the post-war Labour Governments had bequeathed to Britain. In 1962 Armstrong came to live in Dublin, where he stayed for most of the rest of his life. In 1957 he had won a CEMA travel scholarship to Spain, which he began to visit regularly - in the footsteps of George Campbell, who had known Spain for years and was a flamenco guitarist of professional quality (I heard him play many times). The Hendriks Gallery showed him regularly, he built up a solid Dublin base and reputation, and in later years he became a cornerstone of the RA. But his friends and mentors, Dillon and Campbell, both died prematurely in the 1970s and in the opinion of some people who knew Armstrong well, he never fully recovered from the loss. This may go some way to explain the fact that the quality of his painting, which had won a lot of admirers in the early Sixties, sagged a good deal about this time. Frankly, his later exhibitions at the Hendriks Gallery were dull affairs - repetitive West of Ireland landscapes built up into heavy surfaces with the help of gesso. In painting the West, Armstrong was again following in the DillonCampbell footsteps, and he frequently visited Roundstone in Connemara where all of them stayed for periods. SO the works which go on sale this afternoon may come as a surprise to people and critics who, so to speak, thought they had him taped. They do not appear to be dated, but a lot of early works - paintings, drawings, mixed media - are included which seem to date from Armstrong's earlier, fresher years. They show him as a good draughtsman of the human figure - something which almost vanished from his late work - and there are scenes and subjects from Spain and the West of Ireland.Still-life studies, light-filled interiors, boys outside a thatched cottage, a Spanish guitarist - there is a whole, unfamiliar side of him here. And for those who still think of him as man who only painted in greens and browns, there is quite an eye-opening amount of colour. Obviously, Arthur Armstrong was a better - and much more varied - painter than most of us had thought. The Arthur Armstrong auction begins at 2.15 p.m. this afternoon at the National Concert Hall