Robert Ballagh (b.1943) Charles Stewart Parnell (1990) Oil on canvas, 137 x 56cm (54 x 22'') Exhibited: Robert Ballagh: A Retrospective, RHA, Sept. 15th-Oct. 22nd 2006 Literature: ''Robert...

Robert Ballagh (b.1943) Charles Stewart Parnell (1990) Oil on canvas, 137 x 56cm (54 x 22'') Exhibited: Robert Ballagh: A Retrospective, RHA, Sept. 15th-Oct. 22nd 2006 Literature: ''Robert Ballagh - Artist and Designer'', cat. no. 30, full page illustration, pg. 61 Parnell's somewhat informal stance, pale, far-seeing mien and costume, described here with meticulous humane realism, were partly inspired by contemporary sketches that appeared in The Illustrated London News. Ballagh is intrigued by Parnell's role as 'a remarkably key player in both Irish and British politics. Here is the vision and bitterness accrued during a political career when he often held the balance of power at Westminster.' Contemporary accounts describe Parnell (1846-91) as 'cool - extremely so and resolute'. He was variously characterised as handsome, aloof, abstemious, enigmatic, passionate, 'a tall, slender, distinguished figure'. His lover and late wife Katie O'Shea, memorialised in the portrait on his fob watch (a coloured version of the photograph he had with him at Kilmainham jail and carried with him until his death), described her first impression of 'a tall, gaunt figure, tall and deadly pale (with).... curiously burning eyes'. Parnell is himself framed here against the white trompe l'oeil -rendered sash window - itself starkly framed by a hand-carved picture frame, a black-painted border alluding perhaps to his tragically early death. The poignant backdrop of scintillating, clinging ivy leaf seems to symbolise Parnell's resilient legacy in Irish life and culture - for Ballagh, one epitomised by the 'leaf of dark glossy ivy' in a man's lapel, described as a mark of remembrance for Parnell as a political visionary in Joyce's Dubliners. By 1990 (when he also made a wan, elegiac portrait of Oscar Wilde), Ballagh had painted iconic portraits of Irish cultural and political figures. His cruciform-shaped portrait of the radical politician Dr. N?el Browne (1985; Collection, The National Gallery, Dublin) is notable for its innovative use of mixed media (real books and Connemara pebbles at the canvas's feet) and for impeccably evoking the subject's ruminative regard. Robert Ballagh was born in Dublin in 1943. His 1960s' Pop Art paintings incisively explore both the burgeoning consumer culture and, in an austerely abstracted series, the media-snatched frontline of war and civil strife. His portrait of the artist, Micheal Farrell (2001) evokes the subject's worn features with compassionate precision against a background of curvilinear cut-outs of blown-up newsprint referring to the Irish troubles. Ballagh is renowned for stage-set designs for Joyce and Beckett plays, and Riverdance. Since adolescence, Ballagh has been an often wittily disquieting self-portraitist. Recent portrait subjects include J.P. Donleavy (2005) and Louis le Brocquy (2007). A Ballagh Retrospective took place at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 2006. Philip Vann (Based in Cambridge, England, Philip Vann is a writer on the visual arts)

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