Terence P. Flanagan PRUA RHA (1929-2011)
The Long Avenue, Lissadell, Co. Sligo (1960)
Oil on board, 84 x 121.5cm (33 x 48'')
Signed and dated 1960

Exhibited: 'Painting and Sculpture by...

Terence P. Flanagan PRUA RHA (1929-2011)
The Long Avenue, Lissadell, Co. Sligo (1960)
Oil on board, 84 x 121.5cm (33 x 48'')
Signed and dated 1960

Exhibited: 'Painting and Sculpture by Ulster Artists', CEMA Gallery, Belfast, Spring

1960; 'Paintings by T. P. Flanagan', Hendriks Gallery, Dublin

March 1964, Catalogue No.14.

 

At the time this painting was painted, T. P. Flanagan was painting often in watercolours - he is generally regarded as the finest watercolourist of his generation working in Ireland - as can be seen clearly from his handling of oils in The Long Avenue, Lissadell. As a child he had often holidayed at Lissadell, with his aunts - he was virtually brought up by two maiden aunts - and thus he spent the long summer holidays at Lissadell, where he had the run of the garden as well as the great library. It was in the library at Lissadell that W. B. Yeats epic poem, In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz, written in 1927, with its famous lines, The light of evening, Lissadell, / Great windows open to the south, / Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful, one a gazelle celebrates the House and is a threnody to a past age. Here, Flanagans aunt Elizabeth, who was a lacemaker, ran a school of needlework and lacemaking, while his other aunt, Katy, had a cottage nearby. Is it any wonder that their nephew would amuse himself in the house, browsing in its fine library - it is little wonder that he developed a literary turn of mind - and playing in the woods which he came to know intimately. Even as a child Flanagan admired Lissadell as a working estate (some three thousand acres) and was particularly impressed by the trees - sycamores, pines (of which he liked the contours against the sky - something that he would dwell on in his art later) and others, things that would later play a dominant role in his paintings. Often, too, he bathed in the sea at the water wall on the edge of the estate and it was near there that he painted one of his first watercolours, Lissadell Shore, in 1945. Overall, as he recalled, Lissadell had an enormous effect on him; it set, he said, his visual parameters and also stimulated his writing of poetry that dominated much of his early thinking.1

The Long Avenue, Lissadell, epitomizes all this. Here the avenue is shown leading the eye back into the picture towards the sea, the recession of which is halted by the area of dark paint in the distance and the trees to the right which are shown en masse. It is a view that Flanagan painted on numerous occasions in these years and later, for he was greatly drawn to the house itself. But it is the watercolourists use of glazes, especially in the sky and the foreground, that holds ones attention as well as the similar treatment in the massing of the trees.

 

(1) Flanagan, conversation with the author, 24 July 2008. Flanagans early poems remain unpublished, being largely juvenilia. Poems such as On Arney Bridge, The Tale of Swans and Lament for The Red-haired, all written around 1945, are typical examples and they are concerned principally with romance, love and the landscape. They do, however, illustrate his early interests and involve issues that would later dominate much of his painting.

 

Dr S.B. Kennedy March 2017

 

 

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