Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
A Still Life of Fruit
Oil on canvas, 38 x 46cm (15 x 18'')
Signed and dated (19)'86 verso; inscribed on the stretcher, "541 Fruit"

Provenance: With Taylor...

Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
A Still Life of Fruit
Oil on canvas, 38 x 46cm (15 x 18'')
Signed and dated (19)'86 verso; inscribed on the stretcher, "541 Fruit"

Provenance: With Taylor Gallery, label verso; from the collection of the late Gillian Bowler.

Louis le Brocquy was 70 years old when he painted A Still Life with Fruit, and had already been painting for about fifty years, yet there is no diminution of energy or observational powers to be found in it. Instead the apples and possibly peaches in their bowl are painted with a vivacity and lightness of touch that radiates exuberance and joy in the moment.

 

He had been painting still life subjects from time to time since the 1960s. His paintings of lemons, usually single fruits, sometimes in pairs, might be thought of as studies for the composition and lighting of the ancestral heads and portrait images that he produced so prolifically during the same decades. Yet when asked why he painted his still life and bird pictures, he said, [p]erhaps this is simply a temporary release from the heads and their rather intense, reflective consciousness, their tragic aspect. A return to a simple state of being, emerging in its own nature, filling out its little volume of reality with the natural possibilities of its form. (1)

 

In contrast to those paintings of lemons, where the form is isolated and still against a white ground, the fruits and the bowl in this painting are brimming with life, spelled out in the swirling curve of the bowl, the lightning flashes of colour, the sculptural handling of the fruits in the foreground and the deft, almost transparent treatment of the less-defined objects to the rear. Despite le Brocquys typical white tonality, the painting bubbles with colour. The slightly crooked placing of the bowl emphasizes the sense of movement and life. For a simple, little painting of a simple subject, this is le Brocquy at his most baroque.

 

Catherine Marshall, April 2017

 

(1) Louis le Brocquy, in an interview with Ann Cremin, Paris, 1984, quoted in 'Louis le Brocquy Paintings 1939 -1996', Irish Museum of Modern Art, p.88.

 

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