Man and Dog forms part of a series of works that Dillon made in memory of his brother Joe, following his premature death in 1962. This same series of paintings includes Joe’s Bog; Moon Pool (sold in these rooms in 2014); Reflections and The Long Road.

Joe was, of all his family members, the person to which Dillon was most attached. They were two of kind, Joe the musician, Gerard the painter. They shared a creative sensibility, and lives led in the pursuit of art. It is touching to see another image of the musician, Tom Davidson, a close friend of both Joe and Gerard, also represented in the sale in lot 82.

The Pierrot character appeared in Dillon’s work in 1965 and remained a constant presence up to his last series of prints made in 1970. Different in character to the clown figure he had also used at the time, the masked Pierrot was an alter ego that allowed him to explore darker themes. During this period, Joe was also represented through the Pierrot figure and most often he is accompanied by a dog, as seen in a series of sketches Dillon made in an artist’s catalogue. Joe’s own pet was a dachshund named Heine, a constant and steadfast companion, particularly as a single man living alone in London.

In this work Pierrot walks alongside the dog, his hands clasped behind his back, dressed in the traditional white smock and trousers. They walk on a landscape of striped fields, the floating brightly patterned ground reminiscent of a Van Gogh painting, the midnight sky filled with swirling green clouds. There is a great sense movement in the painting, as the two figures travel through this surreal and dreamlike environment. Despite the darker subject matter there is a lightness and vibrancy to the work.

And so, the brothers might both be represented here in the image, in this moonlit place they are reunited, strolling together. They mimic each other in pace, each stepping forward, walking towards the edge of the picture plane. Their journey continues beyond the painting, and Dillon has brilliantly captured the facial expression of the dog as he looks up inquisitively at his companion, as if asking, “Where to?”

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‍Girl Playing Mozart was painted in 1949, a transformative year for Colin Middleton during which he held his first solo exhibition with the Waddington Galleries in Dublin, which immediately established him as one of the leading contemporary Irish artists. The critic of the Dublin Magazine wrote that “With this show, Middleton, from being just one of the more interesting of the moderns, has become a great painter”.

By the winter of 1949, when he was also working on Girl Playing Mozart, Middleton was completing some of his most ambitious canvases of this period, including Give Me to Drink (NMNI) and Isaiah: 54, and Victor Waddington was planning a group exhibition to tour the United States, which would include his work. Waddington welcomed the present painting on its arrival (“The last group of works you sent down are magnificent”), and suggested sending an image of it to those selecting the American exhibition.

Female figures from this period of Middleton’s work are often depicted with a suggestion of vulnerability or extreme circumstances, often on the edges of society. Instead, the present painting implies a world of some comfort and security, with a vase of flowers behind the musician, who is dressed elegantly and wearing a bracelet or a watch. Music was, however, often used by Middleton to suggest powerful but elusive forces that run through lives, and the woman’s glance away from her sheet music, her eyes emphasised by the paint surface, hint at an inner life that is hidden from us, and perhaps only expressed through the deeper currents of the music she plays.

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The Corner of the Square (1947) - This late urban landscape depicts the park in the centre of Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin. Jack B. Yeats lived in a flat in the house on the south east corner of the square from 1929 until shortly before his death in 1957. His studio was also located in this flat and he spent much of his later years in this vicinity.

Unlike his other paintings of this location such as Morning in the City (1937, National Gallery of Ireland) or Little Sister of the Gang (1944, Private Collection), this is a pure landscape without figures. It focuses on the agitated forms of the trees in the square confined by the metal railings that surround them. To the right the dark imposing shadow of the Georgian terrace closes off the composition with railings and foliage of a window box sounding an organic and mysterious note. A pink tinge in the sky on the extreme right suggests that this is very early morning when the streets are still deserted, and nature dominates. The sky is turbulent with a mass of dark swirls crossing from the right, and thick white clouds painted in impasto prominent elsewhere. Parts of the sky have been scraped back to reveal the horizontal lines of the board support, typical of Yeats’s later work. Elsewhere such as in the railings of the park, vertical lines have been scraped into the surface of the paint, drawing attention to the physical construction of the painting. The branches of the trees are made of thick yellow and green pigment and the swirling marks of the paintbrush are clearly evident here creating an intense sense of movement as the boughs sway in the breeze. The foreground, the broad roadway and pavement, is made of fluid paintwork adding to the sense of movement and making the city appear more like an exotic landscape than a quiet Georgian square with its private park in the centre of Dublin.

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The Bog Pool (c. 1921-22) - In The Bog Pool, Henry is working on a much larger scale, and he is embracing the monumentality of the landscape, enhanced by the absence of people or cottages to distract the eye away from the main focus of the composition. Another work on a similar scale can be seen in An Irish Bog dated to 1923 – 25 (S.B Kennedy, no. 606) or, albeit on smaller format, Bog at Evening, 1922 – 23 (S.B Kennedy, no.591). Both works are comparable in their composition to The Bog Pool and together they represent the set pieces that would become iconic images of the West of Ireland.

As is expected in this period, people are scarce, focusing on the landscape, without any cottages or references to the tools used to carry out work on the bogs, though the very presence of turf stacks, cut into sods and piled one on top of the another, acknowledges the work and livelihoods of those nearby communities. The setting is most likely Achill in Connemara, a place that captured his attention and dominated his oeuvre. Henry visited for the first time in 1910 and initially focused on the people of the island community. This work, painted in the early 1920s, reflects a movement towards the pure landscape genre which had begun after his first few years of living there.

It is an uninterrupted view of sky, mountains and marsh lands. The typical Henry palette is employed with blue/ purple for the mountains, the inky black of the turf stacks and lightened by the yellow tones of the grasses. The influence of impressionism is evident in the handling of the paint, applied in varying directions. He uses quick upright strokes for the marshy grasses of the bogland, adding texture and movement to the painted surface. The sky is a muted white, painted with short strokes, in varying directions, giving the impression of an overcast day, light just breaking through the clouds.

The beautiful, mirrored surface of the pool in the centre of the composition reflects the expansive cloud filled sky above, a picture within picture. The curving mounds of turf stacks are repeated and magnified in the shapes of the mountains behind, creating a gentle rhythm within the painting in which the landscape elements speak, in a visual way at least, in complete harmony with one another.

Originally exhibited at the James Hyman Gallery in London in 2008, No 37, Stuttgart 7 Hours 20 Minutes 24.7.44 is one of a series of paintings referring to the experience of the crews of pathfinder bomber aircraft operating from England during the Second World War, and indeed the general subject of war as a tragically destructive human enterprise. O’Donoghue had made several series of works drawing on his father’s experiences in the British Army during the war years, reflecting on lives of those who find themselves unwittingly caught up in the tide of history: both his parents had emigrated from Ireland to England. His own and his parents’ backgrounds were by no means uncommon. He happened to discover that Paul McGuinness had been born on an RAF base in Germany. His father, Philip, a Liverpudlian whose mother had come from Co Kerry, had commanded a pathfinder squadron during the war.

O’Donoghue delved into the history of 35 Squadron and thought about the experiences of the young men who found themselves risking and often losing their lives in a deadly war of attrition against Germany, both sides using every available technology to deliver destruction and death. Thinking about this, he happened one evening on an austere looking, battered volume in a secondhand bookshop, a complex 1920s treatise on maths and physics. The title, The Geometry of Paths, gripped him, and he applied it to a series of works as he consulted a navigator’s wartime logbook carefully documenting a series of pathfinding missions in 1944, routes meticulously calculated to mark venerable locations - not alone Stuttgart but also Berlin, Cologne and more - for the massed bombers following the pathfinders.

In this fine painting, with its epic, ominous sweep, the unwieldy but inexorable Lancaster aircraft (“big sheds with wings” as the artist put it) sets the absolute darkness of night ablaze, like some mythical vessel at the edge of eternity.

Based between North Mayo and London, O’Donoghue is renowned for his painterly explorations of the human subject in the modern world, delving into questions of identity, memory and moral responsibility. His work draws on historical documentation and archives, myth and personal experience. It is included in numerous Irish and international collections.

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The Táin - The Boy Cúchulainn Hurling - Having commissioned a new translation of the Irish mythological epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge from Thomas Kinsella in 1967, Dolmen Press publisher Liam Miller approached Louis le Brocquy with a view to his making a series of illustrations to complement the text. Le Brocquy embraced the challenge. Recalling the striking, calligraphic approach to painting in the work of the Parisian, Belgian-born artist, writer and poet Henri Michaux, inspired by Zen calligraphy, le Brocquy felt he could devise a graphic visual language that would convey the sweep, pace and movement of the great epic and its formidable, larger-than-life characters. Furthermore he could do so harnessing all the freedom of monochromatic, brush and ink drawing, reflecting the reality of the printed black-on-white publication.

The result was a series of remarkable graphic works that brought the ancient world of heroes and incredible feats to vivid life, to universal acclaim. Even as he worked on the brush drawings, le Brocquy began to think that the bold, energised images, formed by pure, unmediated gesture, might by ripe for translation into lithography and tapestry. A major commission for the PJ Carroll & Sons building in Dundalk allowed him to create an epic tapestry, The Táin, woven by Aubusson in 1970. That tapestry is made with a colour palette. A later commission, towards the millennium, prompted him to revisit his original illustrations and realise his ambition to explore the possibilities for working in black-and-white. Atelier René Duché at Aubusson wove another vast commissioned work, Army Massing, and also a series of individual pieces, all in black-and-white, including this energetic tribute to the super-heroic Cúchulainn, celebrating his prowess at the national sport.

One of the leading Irish artists of the 20th century, le Brocquy was a central figure in Irish art and cultural life from the early 1940s onwards. He is celebrated for his approach to capturing the individual human consciousness, including his innovative portrait heads of writers and others.

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By Dr Róisín Kennedy, Niamh Corcoran, Dickon Hall & Aidan Dunne

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