Norah McGuinness HRHA (1901-1980)

The Irish landscape artist, graphic designer and illustrator Norah McGuinness was born in County Derry, Northern Ireland. She studied drawing and fine art painting at the Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin (now the National College of Art & Design), the Chelsea Polytechnic, London, and then (on the advice of Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone) under the French artist André l’Hote, in Paris.

From France, McGuinness moved to London, becoming a member of the avant-garde London Group, and from 1937-39 she lived in New York. After America, she returned to settle in Dublin in 1940. She was elected an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1957 but resigned in 1969.

Norah McGuinness executed vivid, highly coloured, flattened landscape paintings, (as well as still-life and portrait art) in a spontaneous style influenced in part by the colourist Fauvist movement and the artist Lhote. Although her painting remained figurative, her work reveals the Cubist influence of Lhote, and she was associated with the modern movement in Ireland. A founder member of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (she succeeded Mainie Jellet as President in 1944), McGuinness (like Maurice MacGonigal) first showed at the RHA in 1924 and became an honorary member (HRHA) in 1957. She exhibited her paintings and designs in Ireland at the Victor Waddington Galleries and The Dawson Gallery, Dublin, and in London at the Wertheim Gallery. Together with Nano Reid, she represented Ireland in the 1950 Venice Biennale.

In addition to paintings, Norah McGuinness executed a large number of book illustrations, theatre sets and costume designs during her career. She also designed the sales windows of Altman’s in New York and Brown Thomas, Grafton Street for over thirty years.

In 1968, a retrospective for Norah McGuinness artworks, numbering over 100, was staged by the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin. Another retrospective took place at the Frederick Gallery, Dublin, in 1996.

Her work appears in all the major Irish public collections – including: Hugh Lane Art Gallery, Dublin; Arts Council of Ireland; Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; University College Dublin; Waterford Art Gallery Collection; The Victoria and Albert Museum London; Meath County Council – as well as in several important overseas collections such as the Joseph H. Hirschorn collection in New York.

The auction record for a work by Norah McGuinness was set in 2006, when his landscape painting, entitled The Little Harvest, Mayo, was sold at James Adams, in Dublin, for €210,000.

Colin Middleton RHA MBE (1910-1983)

Highly respected Irish landscape artist, figure painter and Surrealist Colin Middleton was born in Belfast in 1910. While he was learning painting and drawing at Belfast College of Art, he was heavily influenced by the work of the Dutch Expressionist Vincent Van Gogh. A deep thinker as well as a modern artist, Middleton’s early work contained non-naturalistic use of colour as well as symbolist even surrealist imagery, leading him to regard himself as the only Surrealist working in Ireland in the 1930s. His paintings first appeared at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1938, although perhaps because of his modern approach to art he only gained associate membership in 1969 and full membership in 1970.

In 1943, the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery arranged a vast, comprehensive one-man exhibition for Middleton – at the time the largest solo show seen. The following year, he held his first solo exhibition in Dublin at the Grafton Gallery in 1944. After this, he devoted himself full-time to painting. More exhibitions followed in Dublin, London and Boston. Post-war images of the Nazi death-camps was a strong influence behind the emotional content of some of Middleton’s greatest paintings. Another response to the war, was to look inwards, and his work in the early 1940s shows a new affection for Belfast life in his genre-paintings of street scenes.

In 1953, Colin Middleton moved to Bangor where he designed numerous theatre sets. He also exhibited alongside Daniel O’Neill at the Tooth Galleries in London. However, the later 1950’s were uncertain years. He was no longer represented by Victor Waddington Galleries, with whom he had succeeded in the post-war years, and he also moved to Portrush, County Antrim, on the north coast. It was here that he began a parallel career as an art teacher that was to endure for the next 20 years. These changes coincided with shifts in Middleton’s painting, as he renewed and strengthened his interest in abstract art in which the theoretical use of colour began to dominate.

A poet and musician, Colin Middleton also produced a vast range of other artwork such as murals, mosaics and posters. In 1969 he was awarded an MBE and appointed AHRA at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), with full membership in 1970. A major Colin Middleton retrospective was held in 1976, at the Ulster Museum and the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin. He continued to exhibit at the RHA until his death in 1983. His paintings, some of which command six figure sums at auction, are represented in a large number of public and private collections.

The auction record for a work by Colin Middleton was set in 2005, when his oil painting entitled Muriel was sold at James Adams, in Dublin, for €170,000.

John Shinnors

Contemporary Irish abstract landscape artist and genre scene painter John Shinnors was born in Limerick in 1950. He studied drawing and fine art painting at the Limerick School of Art and Design, and during his career has enjoyed regular solo exhibitions throughout Ireland as well as a wide range of group exhibitions. He is a member of Aosdana.
As a painter, John Shinnors is primarily a landscape artist whose focus has become increasingly abstract. Typically, he creates several preliminary watercolour studies before executing his large scale oil painting works, usually on stretched linen or cotton. His paintings, which also include interior scenes, exhibit rich chiaroscuro qualities and dramatic contrasts between light and dark.
John Shinnors’ artworks have appeared in one-man exhibitions in many galleries, including: Goodwin’s Gallery, Limerick (1978); Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick (1984); Taylor Galleries, Dublin (1998); Taylor Galleries, Dublin (2000);Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, (Travelling) (2003); The Hunt Museum, Limerick (2003); The Hunt Museum, Limerick (2004); Taylor Galleries, Dublin (2004); Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork (2005); Vangard Gallery, Co. Cork (2003). In addition he has shown at numerous Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and Oireachtas shows.

John Shinnors’ work is represented in many public and private collections such as: Arts Council of Ireland; National Self Portrait Collection, University of Limerick; Office of Public Works; AIB (Allied Irish Banks); Ulster Museum, Belfast; Limerick City Gallery of Art (includes National Collection of Contemporary Drawing). He was the subject of the RTÉ1 documentary “Split Image John Shinnors”. He is also involved in the promotion of the arts through the Shinnors Scholarship. He lives and works in Limerick.

The highest price paid at auction for a painting by John Shinnors was recorded in 2008, when his work, entitled Estuary Forms – Limerick, was sold at Morgan O’Driscoll, in Co Cork, for €70,000.

Roderic O’Conor (1860–1940)

Francophile, an exponent of Post-Impressionism, and one of the most famous figures in Irish Painting of the late 19th and early 20th century, Roderic O’Conor was born in County Roscommon and entered the Dublin School of Art (now the National College of Art and Design) at the age of 19. The following year, along with fellow artist Richard Moynan, he studied drawing and fine art painting at the Royal Hibernian Academy, before going to the Academie Royale des Beaux Arts in Antwerp.
After Antwerp, O’Conor spent time in Paris where he became inspired by the outdoor Impressionist painters like Pissarro and Sisley. As a result, he developed an interest in landscape painting and duly left Paris for the Breton village of Pont-Aven (a latter day Barbizon school), where he worked alongside several artists including the Post-Impressionist painters like Paul Gauguin. In some of his 1890s paintings one can see clear traces of the painting techniques which later became known as Fauvism and Expressionism.

At the Post-Aven school, O’Conor painted two portraits of Breton girls. And in his painting Field of Corn, Pont Aven (1892) his brushwork and colouring is reminiscent of the post-Impressionist Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, who had just committed suicide.
O’Conor spent more of his life in France than any other Irish painter and unquestionably belongs to the sunny ‘Post-Impressionist’ world of the turn of the century. Inspired and engaged by the use of colour, his bold colors and color combinations give his work the stamp of true individuality. Other members of “The Antwerp School”, like Walter Osborne and Nathaniel Hill (both more mainstream Impressionists) and Joseph Kavanagh (Dutch/Belgian style) tended to shy away from O’Conor’s colourism.
After 1904, O’Conor stayed in Paris for the next eight years. Soon his oil painting developed a rich vibrancy of color and a weight of impasto which became two of his mature hallmarks. His subject matter also changed. Instead of landscapes and outdoor artwork, he switched more to painted interiors, nudes and still-life painting.
In Reclining Nude Before A Mirror (c. 1909), the subject is portrayed in a harmony of soft reds, pinks and violets under dim studio light and is reflected in a mirror, in the Baroque tradition. Other female nudes by O’Conor include: Reclining Nude (1910), Perles Rouges (1915), Reclining Nude on a Chaise Longue (1915), La Femme Au Drap Rouge (1916), Seated Nude, Half Length (1923).
He died in Nueil-sur-Layon, France in March 1940.

The auction record for a work by Roderic O’Conor was set in 2005, when his oil painting, entitled La Lisiere Du Bois, was sold at Sotheby’s, in London, for £792,000.

Louis le Brocquy, HRHA (1916-2012)

Dublin-born artist Louis le Brocquy is recognised both in Ireland and around the world as one of the great Irish artists of the 20th century. A master of painting (in figurative and abstract genres), illustration, printmaking, tapestry design and set design, his prodigious work has received widespread international praise during a career spanning seventy years. Awarded the Premio Acquisito Internationale for his painting A Family, which was later included in the historic exhibition ‘Fifty Years of Modern Art’ at Brussels, World Fair 1958, le Brocquy is widely acclaimed for his portrait art, notably his series of Heads of literary figures and fellow artists, which include William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and his friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon and Seamus Heaney.
In addition, his earlier Tinker subjects and Grey period pictures have attracted enormous attention in the international and Irish art market, propelling him into the top group of four modern painters of Ireland and Britain along with Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney. At home, Le Brocquy was one of the few painters to be included in the Permanent Irish Collection of the National Gallery of Ireland.
Le Brocquy first studied chemistry at Trinity College, Dublin, before entering the family business in 1934. Four years later, he left Ireland for two years to study paintings by the great masters in the National Gallery (London), the Louvre Museum (Paris), Venice and Geneva. He returned to Ireland in 1940, to begin a career as a self-taught artist. Along with other contemporary Irish artists, such as Mainie Jellett (1897-1944), Evie Hone (1894-1955), Nora McGuinness (1901-80), and others, he was a founder-member of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943. Three years later, in 1946, he moved to London where he had his first solo exhibition in 1947. In 1958, he married another Irish artist, Anne Madden, and settled in the south of France.

Le Brocquy’s prodigious painting career has included seven overlapping periods: his Tinker paintings 1946-1948; his Grey Period 1950-1956; his White Period 1956-1966; his Head Series 1964-2006; his Procession Series 1984-1992; his Human Images 1996-2004; and latterly his Homage Paintings 2005-2006, which commemorate some of his favourite predecessors such as Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Paul Cézanne and Edouart Manet.
In addition, his still-life painting includes: Still life with Book and Penny (1941); Still life with Apples (1951); Study for Flowers (1953); Still life with Grapes (1955); Fruit Now and Then (1970), Fruit in the Hand (1974).
He was a keen student of the Renaissance paintings of Titian (1485-1576), as well as the nineteenth century French artists Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Edouard Manet (1832-1883). Above all, he was inspired by the great Spanish painters El Greco (1541-1614), Velázquez (1599-1660) and Goya (1746-1828) for their use of whites and greys.
A major focus of Le Brocquy’s art is the human face and head, which he sees as merely the physical iceberg-like manifestation of the spirit which lies beneath. In these pictures, he tries to (as he says) “paint the head image from the inside out”, in order to convey the potential reality of the interior being.

During his long career, Le Brocquy illustrated the work of numerous Irish writers, including Seamus Heaney and Samuel Beckett, as well as Thomas Kinsella for whose translation of The Táin Le Brocquy produced a range of celebrated lithographic brush drawings. Other works illustrated by Le Brocquy include The Playboy of the Western World by J.M. Synge (1970); The Gododdin by Desmond O’Grady (1977); and The Dubliners by James Joyce (1986). In addition, he created the set and costume design for Asmus’s critically acclaimed 1988 production of Waiting for Godot, at the Gate Theatre, Dublin.
In addition to his mastery of painting, printmaking, illustration and set-design, Le Brocquy was also a world class designer of tapestry art. Indeed, in the opinion of some critics he was a seminal figure in the rebirth of this art form. First introduced to the medium in 1948, as a result of an invitation by the Edinburgh Tapestry Weavers, he later collaborated with the long-established French company Tabard Frères & Soeurs to produce tapestries like: Travellers 1948, Allegory (1950), the Eden series (1951-52), the Inverted series (1948-99), the Cúchulainn series (1973-1999), and the Garden series (2000). Examples of Le Brocquy’s tapestries can be viewed in several art museums including the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Ireland.
Today, Le Brocquy is regarded as one of the most innovative representatives of visual art of Ireland. His works have been shown in some of the best art museums in North America, Japan, Australia, France, Spain, Belgium, Slovenia and Mexico, and have been the subject of retrospectives in a number of major galleries, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art (1966). His paintings are represented in many public collections, such as New York’s Guggenheim Museum and the London Tate.
Le Brocquy was an elected Saoi of Aosdana, and in 2007, he was conferred with The Freedom of the City of Dublin, the highest award the City can bestow. He died on April 25, 2012.

The auction record for a work by Louis Le Brocquy was set in 2000, when his oil painting, entitled Travelling Woman with Newspaper (1947), was sold at Sotheby’s, in London, for £1,158,500. Note: In 2002, Louis Le Brocquy’s masterpiece A Family (1951) was sold by private treaty for £1.7 million

Robert Ballagh

The Irish painter and designer Robert Ballagh was born in Dublin in 1943. A graduate of the Dublin Institute of Technology in architecture, he worked as an engineering draughtsman, a musician and a postman before taking up fine art painting full-time at the age of 24.

Pop-art is a major influence on Ballagh’s style of painting, and his artworks can be humorous as well as didactic.

As in the case of many artists, Ballagh was obliged to combine fine art with more commercial design activities. Using his graphic design skills, he produced over 70 stamps for An Post, as well as a series of Irish banknotes (“Series C”) for the government just prior to the introduction of the euro.

Ballagh also produced a wide range of murals, posters, limited prints and book covers. His theatre and set designs include works for “I’ll Go On”, Gate Theatre (1985); Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame”, Gate Theatre (1991); the Riverdance company; Oscar Wilde’s “Salomé”, Gate Theatre, Dublin (1998); and the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics in Croke Park, Dublin (2003).

Ballagh represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale Exhibition in 1969, and at numerous exhibitions in Europe and overseas, such as Florence, Ljubljana and Tokyo. Ballagh’s paintings are held in several public collections of Irish painting including the National Gallery of Ireland, the Hugh Labe Gallery, the Ulster Museum, Trinity College Dublin, and Nuremberg’s Albrecht Durer House.

Major exhibitions of his work have been staged in various European galleries, including Lund, Warsaw, Sofia and Dublin.

Ballagh was elected the first chairman of the Artists’ Association of Ireland (Aosdana) on its foundation in 1981, and is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. Ballagh is married to Elizabeth Carabini in 1967 and has two children.

The auction record for a work by Robert Ballagh was set in 2004, when his interior painting, entitled My Studio (1969), was sold at Whytes, in Dublin, for €96,000.

James Humbert Craig RHA (1877-1944)

The Irish landscape painter James Craig was born in Belfast but spent his youth in the countryside of County Down. His Swiss mother came from a family of artists. Craig briefly attended Belfast College of Art where he studied drawing and fine art painting, cutting short his classes to become a largely self-taught painter of landscapes.

Eschewing all intellectualism or mystique in his art, James Craig took all his inspiration from the scenery, people and culture of Ireland – above all, from what he saw with his two eyes. He never attempted to embellish or distort nature. His job, as a landscape painter was to reflect nature as it was.

Despite this fidelity to Nature, Craig was not above dramatizing his landscape painting in the style of Paul Henry. Also, despite his indifference to Barbizon landscape art, Craig’s plein air painting method was similar to that of the Impressionists, as he was at his happiest out of doors either painting or fishing. Even so, he believed in the typical Irish values of faith, frugality and community. Many of his colour schemes are consciously sober and the raw beauty of the landscape is expressed in rugged paintwork.

Craig painted in many different locations, including the Glens of County Antrim, as well as the more inhospitable coastal landscapes of Donegal and Galway. He developed no interest in figure painting, and some of his human figures are conspicuous for their lack of detail. A successful painter of his day, Craig exhibited regularly at the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1915 and was elected to both the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and the Royal Ulster Academy (RUA).

Examples of his work may be seen in the collections of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The Armagh County Museum, The Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin, The Ulster Museum in Belfast and The National Gallery of Ireland. The Oriel Gallery mounted an exhibition of his work in 1978.

The auction record for a work by the Irish painter James Humbert Craig was set in 2007, when his landscape painting, entitled A Soft Day, Connemara, was sold at Christie’s, in London, for £69,600

Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

Francis Bacon (1909-1992) was an Irish figurative painter, influenced in his earlier years by Picasso and surrealism, whose unique expressionist style of painting, which emerged during the 1950s, featured pictures of people screaming or in pain, often portrayed inside bathrooms or cages. His tortured, nightmarish imagery projected a world of violent and shocking humanity. His talent as a modern expressionist artist blossomed alongside a shambolic personal life, marked by extreme sensuality, gambling and alcoholism. Even so, he was one of the most famous figures in Irish painting and a unique figure in the history of Irish art.

Francis Bacon was born in Dublin. His parents were English and moved several times between England and Ireland. A shy asthmatic child with an effeminate manner, Bacon had little formal schooling, or instruction in either drawing or painting, being taught instead by private tutors. In his late teens, his effeminacy led to the beginning of a lifetime of gay encounters with rich men, many of whom would contribute financially to his career as a painter.

Bacon’s first artistic successes were as a designer of furniture, rugs and interiors, although he maintained his interest and activity in fine art, being particularly stimulated by Picasso’s Neo-Classical drawings as well as his paintings like Les Baigneuses and Le Baiser. In 1933 he achieved his first real sale when his oil painting Crucifixion (1933) was bought by Sir Michael Sadler. In 1934 Bacon staged his first solo exhibition – “Paintings by Francis Bacon” – at the new Transition gallery, displaying seven oils and half a dozen gouache compositions. For a while he painted comparatively little after his solo show in 1934, and destroyed many of the canvases he did complete during the 1930’s and early 1940’s. Not until 1944 did be begin to paint intensively again.

The oil and pastel painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) heralds the beginning of his mature style and includes elements that he returned to many times, such as: the triptych format, the open mouth, and the distorted imagery. When first exhibited in 1945, the painting caused a sensation, and established Bacon among art critics as a major (if controversial) exponent of modern art. Bacon followed this with another masterpiece, Painting (1946).

In 1949, Bacon’s series of six paintings (Head I to Head VI) were exhibited at what was, in effect, a one-man show at the Hanover Gallery. with Study from the Human Body (1949) and Study for Portrait (1949) formed the core of the show with four other paintings by Bacon. His first solo show outside Britain was held in 1953 at Durlacher Brothers, New York, and his first retrospective was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1955.

Another landmark painting was his Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) which is a distorted version of the Portrait of Innocent X (1650, Doria Pamphili Gallery, Rome) painted by Diego Velazquez. The painting is one of 45 variations of the Velazquez picture which Bacon executed throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. When quizzed as to his interest in the subject, Bacon said he merely wanted an excuse to use purple colours without being accused of being a Fauvist.

In 1962, the London Tate Gallery staged a Francis Bacon retrospective, which travelled to Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Other significant exhibitions of his paintings were held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1963); the Grand Palais in Paris (1971); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1975); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1989); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1990); and the Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris (1996).

Bacon died from a heart attack on April 28, 1992, in Madrid, Spain. After his death, the contents of his chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington, were donated to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.

Most Expensive Paintings By Francis Bacon include the following:

• Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969)
Sold by Christie’s New York, in November 2013, for $142 million. The world’s most expensive painting.

• Triptych (1976)
Sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2008 for $86.3 million.

• Three Studies for a Portrait of John Edwards (1984)
Sold at Christie’s New York in 2014 for $80.8 million.

• Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1966)
Sold at Christie’s London in February 2014 for $70 million.

• Study After Velazquez’ Portrait of Innocent X (1953)
Sold for $52.6 million at Sotheby’s New York, in 2007.

• Three Studies for a Self Portrait (1985-6)
Sold for $34.4 million at Christie’s London in 2008.

• Version No 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1968)
Fetched $19.3 million at Christie’s auction, New York, in 2006.

• Crouching Nude (1952)
Sold for £8.3 million (Sotheby’s London, June 2011)

• Study from the Human Body, Man Turning on the Light (1973)
Bought for £8 million at Christie’s London in 2007.

• Portrait of George Dyer Staring into a Mirror (1967)
Fetched £4.9 million at Christie’s London, in 2005.

Evie Hone (1894–1955)

The Irish Cubist painter and stained glass artist Evie Hone was born in Dublin. One of the earliest abstract painters in the history of Irish art, she was the great-great-great granddaughter of Joseph Hone, a brother of the portrait painter Nathaniel Hone the Elder RA (1718-1784) and father of two other portraitists Horace Hone (1756-1825) and John Camillus Hone (1759-1836). Struck by infantile paralysis, Evie suffered from lameness the rest of her life.

After studying drawing and painting at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, Evie Hone continued her studies at the Westminster School of Art under Walter Sickert (1860-1942), where she met her lifelong friend and fellow artist Mainie Jellett (1897-1944).

From London, the pair continued studying in France, first under Andre Lhote, then under Albert Gleizes, the great Cubist theorist. At this time, Evie Hone concerned herself with portraits, landscapes and (increasingly) abstract pictures.

Returning home, Hone and Jellett held a joint exhibition at the Dublin Painters Gallery, largely featuring their new and highly abstract art. The critics were not impressed with the non-representational qualities of the paintings displayed, and were baffled by their abstraction.

After a short break, Evie Hone continued studying with Gleizes. Both she and Jellett joined the Abstraction-Creation group of artists, who specialized in geometric abstraction – or, concrete art – and had their paintings published in the group’s Parisian magazine. Both Irish artists then submitted their paintings to the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Surindependants and the Salon des Independants. Evie also submitted to the Water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI) and during the years 1930-1945 had more than 40 works displayed. Of these, roughly 15 were for stained glass.

From hereon, Evie’s main artistic preoccupation was with stained glass art. She first joined Sarah Purser’s studio – the stained glass co-operative An Túr Gloine – before setting up a studio of her own in Rathfarnham and becoming influenced by the great Harry Clarke.

Over the next twenty years, she undertook a number of commissions and left an impressive legacy of artwork in this genre. Evie Hone’s most important works are the Crucifixion and Last Supper windows at Eton Chapel, Windsor (1949-1952) and “My Four Green Fields”, now located in Government Buildings.

Evie Hone was a founder member of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (IELA). In 1958, University College Dublin staged a memorial exhibition of her Irish painting, drawing and stained glass designs, which attracted a record attendance. In 2005-6, the National Gallery of Ireland held an exhibition of her works.

The auction record for a work by Evie Hone was set in 2005, when one of her stained glass masterpieces – entitled, Stations of the Cross, for Kiltullagh Church, County Galway – was sold at Whyte’s, in Dublin, for €42,000.

Felim Egan

The contemporary abstract painter Felim Egan was born in Strabane, County Tyrone in 1952. He studied painting and drawing in Belfast and Portsmouth before attending the Slade School of Fine Art in London, after which he began exhibiting in the late 1970s. He also studied for 12 months at the British School at Rome in 1980 before returning to Dublin. One of Ireland’s most respected exponents of abstract art, his paintings are carefully built up in layers of thin colour with stone powder ground into the acrylic. His visual vocabulary includes the use of hieroglyphic-type motifs over monochromatic areas of colour, evoking long horizons, big skies and empty sands.

Felim Egan represented Ireland at the Paris Biennale in 1980 and the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1985, and has enjoyed more than 55 solo shows throughout Europe and the USA since 1979. Major exhibitions of his artworks were held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 1995-96, and at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1999. He was awarded the Premier UNESCO Prize for the Arts in Paris in 1983, and in 1997 he received the Gold Award at Cagnes-sur-Mer. Egan has received several large scale commissions, including works for Dublin Castle and the National Gallery of Ireland. In addition, he recently completed a large scale sculpture at Cork Street, Dublin, October 2005. He is also a member of Aosdana.

Felim Egan’s work is represented in numerous collections both public and private, including those of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Hugh Lane Gallery; An Comhairle Ealaion/Tha Arts Council; Trinity College, Dublin; University College Dublin; Office of Public Works; Conrad Hotel; Irish Life, Dublin; Allied Irish Banks; Bank of Ireland; Aer Lingus; A & L Goodbody Ltd, Dublin; Gate Theatre; Kilkenny Castle, Kilkenny; Guinness Peat Aviation, Shannon; the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Ulster Museum, Belfast; North West Arts Trust, Derry; Ardhowen Theatre, Enniskillen; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; The British Library; Frtiz-Winter-Haus, Moderne Kunst Museum, Ahlen, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the European Parliament; Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York; and others.

The auction record for a work by Felim Egan was set in 2007, when his abstract painting, entitled Intertidal Note, was sold at DeVeres, in Dublin, for €19,500.