Gerard Dillon (1916-1971) Connemara Lovers Oil on canvas, 49 x 59.25cm, (19.5 x 23.5'') Signed This is one of a number of pictures that Dillon did along this theme. Their influence was...

Gerard Dillon (1916-1971) Connemara Lovers Oil on canvas, 49 x 59.25cm, (19.5 x 23.5'') Signed This is one of a number of pictures that Dillon did along this theme. Their influence was mentioned in James White's book on Dillon ''He also told me that the picture recorded an unforgettable night in Roundstone when he and Nano Reid were walking home after a late night's drinking.''The moon was so huge and romantic hanging over the land that even the young man in the picture was proposing marriage to the girl to whom he was making love''. This is a very romantic and charming work by the artist, where he uses a synthesis of a Connemara landscape, looking from the mainland possibly at Ballyrubbic below the village of Roundstone to the island whose liniments he has made so much his own, Inishlacken. The time is set around the Harvest Moon which falls in August at the old Celtic feast of Lughnasa which is amongst other things a time of fertility in humans and in nature, and like the feast of Johns Night(Oiche She?n) when people jump through the magic fires which were traditionally lit in the countryside as an oblation to Lugha(of the T?atha de Danan). It is a rich mine of Irish Oral culture and one which produced a great mother lode for our most prestigious living playwright Brian Friel. In this instance the painter has placed two lovers on the foreground, and in the middle distance along the beach another couple embrace,and all set against the incoming sea and the houses on the more distant island. Overhanging all like an enormous decorated Chinese Lantern the Cailleach or gCailleach - the Moon smiles down benignly on the puny humans below him, although the name in Irish may also be a synonym with the witch or St. Brigid(Br?d?g a demi goddess of fertility and celebrated to the present day in the form of the St.Brigid's Cross). The Harvest Moon appears on a vast scale over Inishlacken and when viewed from the mainland at Roundstone it seems as if it could almost be within reach and it appears much larger than the very island itself, it can also be seen at the time of the feast of Samhain (November) and has the same extraordinary scale relative to the landscape over which it is suspended. The same theme was used by a number of artists notably Jack B. Yeats with his famous work Harvest Moon (sold in these rooms in 1989 and now in the K. Club) and gives the sense of power with which nature is endowed by human sentiment and tradition, with magic and mystical associations such as the feasts of Samhain, Lughnasa and Bealtaine, which more orthodox belief never entirely vanquished and banished underground like the T?atha de Danan, the progenitors of the S?dhe, or the fairy folk of legend. The painter uses a form he likes and which appears in a great number of his works, that is of a curious cold light with some odd or fantastic detail working under the influence of Giorgio de Chirco, with its surreal qualities. The spangled stellar decoration over the face of the moon is echoed by the bursts of light which represents the stars in the firmament, adding to the sense of gaiety and life in this lunar lit seaboard scene of great charm and delicacy. The artist's own experience of and interest in stage design is evident in this delightful work, being both a staged piece of observation and is part of his own interest in and use of the Moon as an important symbol of the transitory nature of human kind and its affairs. This writer once discussed with the artist the stories by Hans Christian Anderson of ''What the moon saw'' where the Moon tells a little boy what he'd seen that day and night all over the world, these delightful stories had charmed and delighted the artist as well they might given his use of the Moon as a pictorial symbol in so many of his works. The work is dated to the mid 1950s. Prophetically the artist himself was to die at the Festival of Lughnasa in 1971. Ciar?n MacGonigal, May 2008

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