Basil Blackshaw HRUA HRHA (1932-2016)
Green Landscape II (1973)
Oil on canvas, 45 x 45cm (17¾ x 17¾'')
Signed; inscribed 'Landscape - towards Co. Down from Springfield House, Magheragall'...

Basil Blackshaw HRUA HRHA (1932-2016)
Green Landscape II (1973)
Oil on canvas, 45 x 45cm (17¾ x 17¾'')
Signed; inscribed 'Landscape - towards Co. Down from Springfield House, Magheragall' verso

Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast, label verso

 

Basil Blackshaw’s friend, Hugh McIlveen, recalled that, at a time when the painter was experiencing some personal difficulties, Tom Caldwell ‘made a small flat available to [him] at ‘Springfield’, the large Victorian house in Magheragall, which he had purchased in the early sixties.’ An inscription on the stretcher of Green Landscape II (although different from the title) locates the present work at Springfield, and demonstrates the artist’s move towards a slightly lusher and less austere style of working in the early 1970s, which was perhaps more concerned with mood than structure.

Like most Blackshaw landscapes of the 1960s and 1970s, the artist engages with a large and expansive space, but while the earlier paintings of Divis and Black Mountain are preoccupied with the distant hills and the space across the valley, in the present painting, the view is more enclosed and there is a very human scale in the manner in which Blackshaw leads the viewer through a succession of fields, rising up towards the horizon, with the detail and energy in the foreground a reminder of the artist’s presence.

Blackshaw’s palette in this period is generally more naturalistic, and demonstrates the powerful, and perhaps restorative, effect that particular landscapes still retained on him, even at a point in his career when his paintings of racehorses, dogs and cockerels had begun to define his work for many collectors.

Dickon Hall, April 2025

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