Maurice MacGonigal PRHA (1900 - 1979) Autumn Day, Roundstone, Connemara (1972) Oil on Board, 60 x 70 cm (24 x 27.5'') Signed, also signed, inscribed and dated 1972 verso For almost 50 years the...

Maurice MacGonigal PRHA (1900 - 1979) Autumn Day, Roundstone, Connemara (1972) Oil on Board, 60 x 70 cm (24 x 27.5'') Signed, also signed, inscribed and dated 1972 verso For almost 50 years the artist recorded the changing faces of the Connemara Landscape. From Renvyle in North Connemara (1924 onwards)South Connemara(Carraroe 1930-'40s)and then the Roundstone area from the late 1940s where he had two homes and is buried in Gorteen outside Roundstone,he identified so much with that landscape. He loved to know who owned which field, how much was paid for it, was it any good; what kind of cattle there were,what horses and donkeys,and the changing light as seen with each tide. For him,as he often said the thrill of pictorial notation lay in the observation of the mark of the human upon the landscape,the scale and grandeur of that same landscape and the marks left by previous generations as they tilled the soil,hewed the work and carried the turf. In this work the artist used the projecting balcony of his house on the Quay in Roundstone(The Quay House)from which to gain his vantage point in constructing a forshortened perspective across the foreground of the stone quay to the distant 12 Bens across Inishnee to the rising landscape of Cashel. Mr.Tinne's Hooker is anchored mid foreground,with the Carna trawler unloading at the end of the pier; the figures left and right give the scale to the immensity of the sea even in this inlet on Bertraghboy Bay lapping around Nimmo's pier,just as the tide is turning to ebbtide. In the right foreground is the standing figure of a neighbour on the Quay Mrs.Neusink and to the left the artist's wife and son sit on Tommy de Courcey's Lobster Storage tank box. The treatment of the reflected and refracted light on the water is typical of his looser technique at this time and he uses the red marker buoy to accelerate the forshortening perspective and which as the expression of a pictorial device ''anchors''the compostion in the form of dynamic assymetry which he liked as part of the 'golden mean' structure of the painting. And,by using the uprights of the boats spars including the smaller one on the painter to the viewer's left he repeats the divisions horizontally and vertically. It is part of his ?uvre marking the brilliantly coloured autumn of his painting life,one of the Roundstone sequence is in the Dublin City Gallery, ''a September Morning''also a Rounstone painting. Ciar?n MacGonigal, November 2010

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