*Edward McGuire (1932-1986)
Michael Hartnett
Oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm (30 x 24)
Signed

Provenance: Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, USA, label verso.

Exhibited: Irish Imagination, ROSC...

*Edward McGuire (1932-1986)
Michael Hartnett
Oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm (30 x 24)
Signed

Provenance: Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, USA, label verso.

Exhibited: Irish Imagination, ROSC 1971, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Irish Imagination, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, Oct 20 - Nov 19, 1972, catalogue no. 42.

Edward McGuire, according to Brian Fallon, was not only the finest portrait painter of his generation but possibly the finest portraitist since John Butler Yeats. Born in Dublin in 1932, to affluent parents, McGuire was unwell as a boy. A heart murmur meant he was educated at home by a private tutor. Then, aged twelve he went to St Conleths in Clyde Road and two years later he attended Downside School in Somerset run by the Benedictine order.

McGuire left school in 1950, visited Italy with his father, a business man and amateur artist, and on seeing Italian art first hand he was determined to become an artist. In 1951 McGuire studied in Rome where he took lessons from Pietro Annigoni, whose 1950 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II had been highly praised. He also spent time in Florence and Positano.

McGuire briefly joined his fathers successful business but it was not for him and in 1954, McGuire, though he found institutions challenging, enrolled at the Slade where Lucian Freud was one of his teachers. The story goes that Freud told McGuire that he would be better and happier painting alone. McGuire returned to Dublin and then spent a year living simply, in a small cottage with no running water, on Aranmore, the largest of the Aran Islands.

That year, he collected sheep bones, skulls especially, and drew them and by doing so he understood and mastered bone structure. Back in Dublin he set up studio, first in the family home, and then on Leeson Street where he lived from 1959 to 1966. McGuires studios were always obsessively neat and tidy; one such studio was, according to Brian Fallon, as unwelcoming as a dentists surgery.

Best known for his portraits of literary figures, including Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Durcan, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Cronin, John Montague, Francis Stuart and this one, from 1971, of Michael Hartnett. The Hartnett portrait was included in the Irish Imagination exhibition which was part of the 1971 Rosc Exhibition in Dublin and later travelled to America where an American buyer purchased it and where it has been ever since. This exceptional work, in private hands for fifty years, is now available again. For admirers of both McGuire and Hartnett, for discerning art collectors, here is a wonderful and unique opportunity.

This classic McGuire work shows a thirty-year-old Hartnett by which time Hartnett had published Poems 1958-1970, Secular Prayers, Anatomy of a Cliché, Thirteen Sonnets and Notes on My Contemporaries. Hartnett, born 1941 in Croom Co Limerick, was educated locally and at UCD. He worked for a while as curator of Joyces tower at Sandycove, lived in Madrid and London, returned to Dublin where he worked at the international telephone exchange, as a house painter and as a lecturer in creative writing. He moved to Newcastle West in 1974 and died in 1999.

Seamus Heaney said of Hartnett that He followed his own impulse and never had his eye on any audience. Small of stature and modest, McGuire does not have Hartnett fill or dominate the frame and yet Hartnetts deep intelligence is captured in his steady look. The formal collar and tie, the big overcoat lend him an appropriate gravitas and the window giving on to bird and foliage ivy leaves and lapwing or plover - is a characteristic McGuire touch.

Brushing slowly, with fastidious skill is how John Montague described McGuires technique. Every detail is attended to: the wooden window frame, the folds and texture of the coat, the veins on the ivy leaves, the shadows cast. Its recognisably Michael Hartnett but it captures so much more than a realistic image and like McGuires finest portraits, and this is one of them, it contains what Brian Fallon calls their silence and strangeness, nearness and remoteness

Signed, lower right, Edward McGuire 1971, this portrait was not commissioned. Significantly, McGuire chose to paint Hartnett whom he had sat with many times in Dublin pubs and whose poetry he admired. Hartnett, who had never sat for an artist before, wrote in 1987, a year after McGuires death [in Irish Arts Review, vol. 4, no. 4, Winter 1987] that he thinks that there were five sittings in McGuires studio, that McGuire worked from life and photographs, that they spoke about Andrew Wyeth and Francis Bacon and poetry, and that he had caught me, bitterness, warts and all, on canvas.

Niall MacMonagle

April 2022

 

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