Basil Blackshaw HRHA RUA (1932-2016)
Cockerel
Oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm (15¾ x 19¾")
Signed

Provenance: With Solomon Gallery, Dublin, label verso; Collection of the late Vincent Ferguson; Private...

Basil Blackshaw HRHA RUA (1932-2016)
Cockerel
Oil on canvas, 40 x 50cm (15¾ x 19¾")
Signed

Provenance: With Solomon Gallery, Dublin, label verso; Collection of the late Vincent Ferguson; Private Collection

 

A good friend of Basil Blackshaw’s, Hugh McIlveen, noted that the rural community into which his family moved shortly after his birth, Boardmills, was crucial in shaping his sensibility. It was only 20 miles south of Belfast but it was a world apart, a realm of small farms and “high hedgerows.” It was, McIlveen points out, only supplied with mains electricity in 1953. Here Basil, the son of a professional hunt horse trainer who worked regularly in England, spent a childhood among animal breeders, steeped in rural pursuits. The yards at home, first Boardmills and, later on, Culcavy, Hillsborough, were perpetually busy with horses, terriers, lurchers and, a little underneath the radar, fighting cocks. Of the latter, McIlveen writes, Blackshaw had “an unusually expert knowledge.”

Blackshaw spent a great deal of time looking at animals of one sort of another. His paintings of cockerels of whatever kind tend to be intensely lively, vivid, even explosive in terms of movement and energy. Wild flurries of paint equate to the fierce animation of the birds. Here, the artist conveys the colours, mass and drive of the animal with bursts of paint applied at speed. He scrapes through the storm of pigment, perhaps with the tip of the brush handle - like many other painters including Caravaggio - to pin down and indicate the continuity of form in the midst of the confusion.

The youngest of seven siblings, Blackshaw was recognised as being precociously gifted and fast-tracked his way through art college. He remained a countryman, however, never settling in the city and usually surrounded by animals. Famously, when he took on a teaching job, a traditional livelihood for art graduates, he treated the school’s temporary closure during a snowy spell as a providential sign and never went back. Renowned for his paintings of landscape, a range of animals, the human figure and many portrait subjects, he was and remains highly esteemed among artists and public alike.

Aidan Dunne, October 2022

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