Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
Battersea Boy
Oil on canvas, 30.5 x 25.5cm (12 x 10'')
Signed and dated (19)'54; inscribed verso
London, Gimpel Fils, 1955

Provenance: With Mark Adams Fine...

Louis le Brocquy HRHA (1916-2012)
Battersea Boy
Oil on canvas, 30.5 x 25.5cm (12 x 10'')
Signed and dated (19)'54; inscribed verso
London, Gimpel Fils, 1955

Provenance: With Mark Adams Fine Art; Private Collection, Northern Ireland; de Veres Art Auctions, Sale June 2007, Lot 73; Private Collection Dublin.


In her introduction to the 1966 le Brocquy Retrospective exhibition at The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and The Ulster Museum, Prof. Anne Crookshank noted that the artist is one of the strangely few artists who were born into an environment where a knowledge and love of art and literature were matters of everyday concern. Nevertheless, it was not until he was twenty-two, after he had been in the familys business for some four years, that he decided he wanted to paint above all else. He set about it in an unconventional way which is, however, the oldest method of learning: from the paintings of the past.

He was enthralled by Spanish painting and its influence has remained a feature of his work, where the precision of his tone values and his use of greys and whites, both very prominent factors in Spanish painting, are constantly important.

From the beginning le Brocquy had remarkable fluency and the early academic paintings have a beauty and authority which is astonishing in view of his inexperience. Occasionally, much later, he again used old masters as the basis of his composition, but with much freer treatment. For instance, in Children in a Wood (1954) which is based on a Nicolaes Maes, he has raised the original into the complexity of a nearly cubist work, the figures and the background creating a closely related pattern like a carved high-relief.

About 1950, a noticeable change takes place in the artists style. His subject matter is still concerned with human beings, but now more directly with the concept of family. The paintings are much simpler and for the first time he realizes empty spaces and relates forms to them with conviction. His family groups are placed in shallow, unidentifiable settings and represent the essential qualities of humanity rather that of particular human beings.

The present work, Battersea Boy painted in 1954, when the artist was living and working in London, is one of a small series of works depicting children from the locality where the artist lived. A similar sized work entitled Battersea Child, also painted that year, was exhibited in the 1966 Retrospective (Cat. No. 29).

Crookshank comments further His pictures of children, which occur frequently during these years, evoke the innocence, wonder and clumsiness of the very young. But all his figures, though usually grouped, produce an impression of isolation. During these years he uses colour very sparingly and the overall effect is one of tonal contrast. In 1955 this grey period comes to an end.

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