Patrick Leonard HRHA (1918-2005) Unloading the Catch, Loughshinny Harbour Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 89cm (30.5 x 35'') Signed Born the son of a Master Mariner, growing up and living in sight of the...

Patrick Leonard HRHA (1918-2005) Unloading the Catch, Loughshinny Harbour Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 89cm (30.5 x 35'') Signed Born the son of a Master Mariner, growing up and living in sight of the sea at Rush it was inevitable that Marine subjects would form an important part of Leonard's ?uvre. The shoreline of Fingal including Skerries, Rush, Donabate and Loughshinny has always been an important fishing area particularly for crustaceans and the Seine fishermen have for centuries supplied the local and Dublin markets with these. In this work the Seine boats and their crews are being visited by the Fish Buying Agent, seen in a suit in the foreground with the skipper as an onlooker, and the various kinds of fish on offer will form part of the haul for the major fishmarkets. Traditional Seine Boats are seventeen feet long and clinker built with Elm bottoms and larch topsides. They were propelled by oars or sails and were usually named after the owner's mother or wife. These boats have been used in estuaries for hundreds of years working salmon seines. A salmon seine is a net that is two hundred yards long and over half a ton in weight. A seine boat carries the net and a four-man crew and is rowed by two fourteen-foot oars,the sail is the option for leaving and returning to port. The boats must be able to carry a ton of shellfish and still float in less than eighteen inches of water. In the past the Seine boats were also used in the winter months for catching herring and sprats. The conditions would be hazardous when working over the bar entrance to Loughshinny and Rush. Seine boats tend to be very safe and thus popular. They also figure in the trackless wastes of the storylines of East and West Cork as captured so amusingly and tellingly by the ''Irish RM ''stories and the law suits which figured in the Courthouse of Skebawn presided over by Major Yates RM, where the mysteries of dividing up the catch between the Crew & the Boats share would as Major Yates observed defy the arithmetic of Colenso. This vivid and sparkling work uses many of the visual syntactical approaches essayed by Se?n Keating and Charles Lamb in their Western imagery, but made more immediate by the comparative modernity of the fishing craft and the attire of the figures in the foreground. The agelessness of the activity of fishing and selling the produce gives this work its timeless appeal and is a seamless restatement of and by artists who either live on Islands or whose local economy is virtually entirely dependent on the sea for a living. The sandy soil of the area, which also supports a large horticulture industry gives a particular quality of light, and which Patrick Leonard used to such vivid effect in so many of his finest works amongst which this work must rank very highly. By the repeated use of some colour notes like chrome yellow and reds creating internal dynamics of triangulation the artist stresses the visual appeal of the work by concentrating the eye of the viewer in several narrow bands of compositional interest and giving the work its ''bounce'' as a vivid and energetic pictorial statement of the life led in harvesting the Sea. Ciar?n MacGonigal, May 2012

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