Gerard Dillon (1916 - 1971)
Man on a Chair (Self-Portrait)
Oil on canvas on board, 35.5 x 50.7cm (14 x 20")
Signed; inscribed verso with title

Provenance: With The Oriel Gallery, Dublin, label...

Gerard Dillon (1916 - 1971)
Man on a Chair (Self-Portrait)
Oil on canvas on board, 35.5 x 50.7cm (14 x 20")
Signed; inscribed verso with title

Provenance: With The Oriel Gallery, Dublin, label verso

 

The self-portrait is usually based on a mirror image but there is nothing usual about this Gerard Dillon painting, Man on a Chair, which has always been thought of as a self-portrait. The setting is the West of Ireland, which Dillon first visited in 1939, and four figures are included in this outdoor scene. Dillon himself is seated on a sturdy kitchen chair. In the background a fisherman figure on the quay goes about his business, another figure is seated in a currach, a rope links both. But it is the fourth figure, a young man, by a stone wall and the relationship between him and Dillon that interests and intrigues. They gaze intently at each other and though both are fore-grounded they are separated by a low stone wall. 

 

That the wall divides them invites questions. Is the actual wall also symbolic? Is this a casual conversation? Or do they know each other well? Beyond the wall the land falls away towards the sea meaning that the young man could be standing or kneeling but, whether kneeling or standing, he is portrayed as a still presence. Both of the central characters in this quiet drama have clasped hands and the focus of Dillon’s attention is clearly on a youth beyond the stone wall. That wall could be said to be a divide between youth and age or a younger self and older self. Both man and boy seem absorbed with each other. The seated figure looks intently, the object of his gaze seems equally engaged. 

 

Lower left, Dillon lets the curled-up, sleeping cat lie, its anthropomorphic face adds a delightful detail as do the patterned quayside, the striped shirt, the two cottages, the blue sea and sky all rendered in thinly-applied paint with assured brushwork. James White [in Gerard Dillon, An Illustrated Biography] says ‘the most important development in his life as an artist was his discovery of Connemara . . . with its remoteness , its delightful stonewall fields, mountains, lakes and seacoast, and above all islands like Inislacken where he could cut himself off for a spell and live in a tiny cottage . . .  – all this gave him a feeling of having found a land free of all the restrictions and suggestions of oppression which he had come to accept as being there to offend him.’

 

In 1955, Dillon wrote [in Ireland of the Welcomes, May/June 1955] ‘Connemara is the place for a painter. The stony parts are the parts for me . . . . The light is wonderful here. Rocks, stones and boulders change colour all the time’ and in July 1964 he said ‘My numerous stays in Connemara have always been heaven, even when the bottom of heaven fell out and about us drenching everything around’. Dillon thought the people there ‘a race apart, very friendly and polite, they never intrude’. This is clearly a personal painting by Dillon who, born in Belfast in 1916, the youngest of eight children, left school at fourteen and worked as a painter and decorator. He attended evening classes at Belfast College of Art but moved to London [1934-1941], then to Dublin, to London again [1945-1968] but painted in Inislacken and Roundstone in the late 1940s and 1950s. The small harbour and pier in Man on a Chair suggest Roundstone and most likely this work dates from the 1950s. His interest in Ireland’s folklife and countyside life featured in many of his paintings but as Catherine Marshall observes ‘there is also a strong sense of alienation, which may derive from perceptions of his difference as an artist, and also from his homosexuality in a repressive Roman Catholic environment’.

 

Dillon had several solo exhibitions in Belfast and London and his work was shown in Paris, Rome, Boston, Washington and New York. He represented Ireland at the Guggenheim International and Britain at Pittsburg International Exhibition. In a letter to the Irish Times, dated 20 August 1969, at the outbreak of the Troubles, Dillon asked other artists to join him in his refusal to be included in the Belfast Living Art Exhibition in protest, as he out it, ‘against the persecution of the Irish people by a planter Government in the Six Counties of Ulster’.  

 

Dillon died two years later, in 1971, aged fifty-five. Writing of Dillon’s lasting impact, Dorothy Walker [in Modern Art in Ireland] says Dillon was ‘a genuine primitive, a self-taught painter whose early work of the forties and fifties . . . are delightful’. Man on a Chair is one such work but it not only delights, its quiet narrative puzzles, intrigues and draws the viewer in.  

 

Niall MacMonagle, August 2022

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