Letitia Marion Hamilton RHA (1878 - 1964) The Harbour, Roundstone, Connemara Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed with initials This picture holds the world record price for Letitia...

Letitia Marion Hamilton RHA (1878 - 1964) The Harbour, Roundstone, Connemara Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed with initials This picture holds the world record price for Letitia Hamilton having sold in these rooms at the Important Irish Art Sale 28th September 1989 for IR ?30,000 + fees. Provenance: Private Collection, Dublin Possibly the work described as 'The Harbour Roundstone' and exhibited at her solo exhibition in the Victor Waddington Gallery in 1945. Roundstone attracted artists from the middle of the 19th century but particularly towards the end of the century when the Galway to Clifden line brought visitors to nearby Recess Station and thence by pony & trap or side car, before that the Bianconi coaches had brought visitors in great numbers to Connemara. Roundstone had two striking features, the view of it from the Cashel-Toombeola-Recess Road, mounting the hill which was crowned until the 1920s with the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church and the Presbyterian Kirk with its rusticated stone gables and the long straggle of houses descending step by step to the harbour. The other view is from the main street across Cashel Bay to the Twelve Bens, whose shape and form changes from moment to moment and at the turning of the tides can be very dramatic in terms of colour from an artist's point of view. Although a pupil of Sir William Orpen, Hamilton uses almost none of his technique, instead she relied much more on the idea of ''peinture Claire'' as espoused by Manet, in using the white ground of the canvas as high lights and a heavily impastoed surface laid on with a palette knife and front lit. This long view of the village and the harbour with the rectory (still with a resident rector until the mid 1950s) on the left and on the right the old dispensary house acquired by the writer Kate O'Brien and renamed the Fort (and now bearing no relationship to what it had once been) and before the trees grew up around it for shelter behind the walls which O'Brien had built up having acquired the old dispensary in 1950. The harbour which had undergone every change since it was built by the Nimmos in the middle of the previous century had however languished, as its active use as a fishing base for the Herring shoals had declined from early in the 20th century. The artist gives a lively sweep of clouds and a great sense of the drama of the landscape with large bright clouds and the panorama of the Bens as the remarkable profile of shapes against the sky. Also to be seen in the descending line of houses are the old Mission School & Dispensary, the old Commercial hotel and the courthouse which was visited by William Makepeace Thackeray in the 19th century. The artist uses the smaller fish quay as the foreground and contains the drama within the harbour walls with the currach and the puc?n so that the thrust of the composition is very dynamic allowing the mountains and sea to balance the entire, with the view towards Cushatrawer and Inish Nee. Until a great age, the artist sitting and painting, safe from the winds and the midges in her little van in which she'd travelled Europe, was a very regular sight in Roundstone. Ciar?n MacGonigal, December 2008

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