Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
Diana - Triumph of the Moon
Oil on board, 57.5 x 36cm (22½ x 14¼'')
Signed; dated 1942 verso

Provenance: deVere's Salerooms, November 29th, 2006, lot...

Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
Diana - Triumph of the Moon
Oil on board, 57.5 x 36cm (22½ x 14¼'')
Signed; dated 1942 verso

Provenance: deVere's Salerooms, November 29th, 2006, lot 69.

 

Diana's protracted, varied evolution as a mythical goddess began with her pre-Greek origins as a guardian of the earth and its creatures. Thereafter the Greeks cast her as a chaste huntress, though she later took on the mantle of the notably non-chaste moon goddess Luna. As moon goddess, her attribute is a crescent moon. The Romans completed the picture by promoting her to being a triple deity, encompassing earth, sky and underworld.

 

At some point after he returned to Dublin in 1940, le Brocquy became acquainted with, and was impressed by, the Corlech Head in the National Museum. The sandstone, three-faced head, androgynous in appearance, is named after the hill in Co Cavan close to where it was discovered in 1855. At the time the hill was still the location for an annual Lughnasa festival, including ceremonies thought to involve the carving. The head is generally thought to be a representation of a triple deity derived from earlier ideas of a three-natured goddess; a synthesis of Roman and local traditions.

 

Le Brocquy's Diana emerges fragmentarily from and blends into a turbulent sky in a way that prefigures the presences and heads that appear later on in his work, manifested against a white ground. There's a symbolist feeling to the stylised, elongated form. The goddess's is a triumph in the Roman sense - a grand procession of celebration.

 

Le Brocquy was at the time delving into classical mythology as he worked on set and costume designs for his mother Sybil's play Don Jupiter, a translated adaptation of Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38, one of many versions of an original, lost tragedy by Sophocles. Le Brocquy had returned to Dublin after spending about two years away, visiting some major galleries in London, Paris, Geneva (where the Prado collection was temporarily housed) and Venice. An artist of tremendous natural facility, he studied the work of the great painters at first hand and learned much. Although the Ulster Museum purchased a major painting by him, Girl in White, in 1941, the RHA rejected his work for its annual exhibitions, encouraging his involvement in the establishment of an alternative to the RHA, the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. Intellectually curious, he was extremely active in Dublin during the war years, working in the theatre and following developments in art and science as well as painting. By the time he moved to London in 1946, he had completed many of his Traveller paintings and had accrued a wealth of experience and ideas that shaped and informed his subsequent artistic development.

 

Aidan Dunne, 2020

 

 

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