Comparisons may be often odious but they can also be fascinating, and that is certainly the case when looking at the collection of pictures currently being shown by Sotheby's in Dublin a week after Christie's engaged in the same exercise. The latter included more pre-20th century work, but that being offered at the Sotheby's sale on May 18th contains some truly fascinating lots, in particular two relatively early works by Louis Le Brocquy. Both were last seen here when included in the artist's retrospective held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art four years ago. The more important, though smaller, of the pair dates from around 1947-48 and was, therefore, painted soon after Le Brocquy had moved to London, where he held a highly successful exhibition at the Leicester Galleries. As a result, he told a later interviewer, "ever since then, I've been able to live by my brush alone".
Still, if Travelling Woman with Newspaper (lot 158) was created in England, the spirit behind that inspiration was indisputably Irish. This was one of a series of pictures about what used to be called (including in the works' titles) Tinkers until that term fell from favour.
Le Brocquy produced them during the immediate post-war period following his discovery of Travellers outside Tullamore, Co Offaly, and in particular of their private language, such as the twig signs they used to pass on information to one another.
The paintings made a powerful impression at the time; in July 1946, Ernie O'Malley wrote about the artist's new work for Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine, observing that the Travellers' "aloofness, intractability and fierce independence interested Le Brocquy . . .For the creative worker they could represent the artist who deals in the unexpected and the unrecognised, and who suffuses with meaning familiar things against the inanition of their too facile and unmeaning existence." Having spent from 1938 until the Nazi invasion of France in Europe, Le Brocquy was very well informed about the inter-war trends in painting.
Dorothy Walker, in a 1981 study of the artist, also noted that Traveller Woman with Newspaper was included in a 1949 British Council exhibition in Amsterdam, where it was seen by the American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning; she understandably speculates on the effect the picture had on de Kooning's subsequent series of pictures of women. For all these reasons, this painting carries a high estimate of £200,000-£300,000.
The other Le Brocquy in the Sotheby's sale is larger, darker and later, and it has the slightly lower figure of £180,000-£250,000. Painted in 1954, Lazarus (Lot 161) shares certain characteristics with the work of another Irish painter, Francis Bacon, in its depiction of the human form.
But Le Brocquy has the more optimistic spirit of the two and this aspect of his nature means the picture is not as bleak as might otherwise be the case. Given that just a few years later the artist would begin to produce the first of the single images emerging from a canvas for which he would soon become known, Lazarus represents almost the conclusion of one period during his long career.
