NOT SOLD (BIDDING OVER)
0.00EUR+ applicable fees & taxes.
This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2004 Apr 27 @ 17:00UTC+00:00 : GMT
Gerard Dillon (1916-1971)
PIERROT WITH PAINTING OF KING WILLIAM III
signed lower right
oil on board
76 by 99cm., 30 by 39in.
Provenance:
Artist’s family
Painted circa 1968-1969.
Gerard Dillon was born and raised in Belfast. After working in London as a
painter and decorator, in 1930 he began to paint pictures, a sphere in which he
was largely self-taught. Caught in Ireland by the outbreak of the Second World
War and, due to travel restrictions, unable to return to England, he decided to
move to Dublin. There he held his first one-man exhibition in February 1942.
Immediately his talent was recognised, the Irish Times (24 February 1942)
commenting of his exhibition that he could "put the breath of life" into his
pictures. Thereafter, mainly through the annual ‘Living Art’ exhibitions, Dillon
made a reputation for himself and shortly came to be regarded, along with a
number of his Northern confreres - George Campbell, Nevill Johnson, Dan O’Neill
- as one of the most interesting Irish painters of his generation, his subject
matter increasingly drawn from the West, from the Aran Islands and Connemara in
particular. His early return to London after the war, however, meant that the
west of Ireland did not quite monopolise his work as it might otherwise have
done.
But besides Dublin and the West, Dillon spent a good deal of time during the war
years in Belfast. There, in the wake of the Blitz of 1941, in pictures such as
Result of a Raid and Blitzed Landscape he set down with a strong sense of pathos
the uneasy life he found around him, notably for those "little shuffling
people", as the poet and critic John Hewitt once called them1, whose homes had
been destroyed by the Luftwaffe. Dillon was clearly moved by these events and
his memories of the hardships of civilian life during the war remained with him.
It is in the context of his war-time experiences that Pierrot with Painting of
King William III should be judged. Here, on what was to be the eve of another
period of thirty years’ ‘war’ in Northern Ireland - although Dillon, of course
did not know that at the time - the pathos of his previous experiences returns,
although in a more sophisticated manner. The picture is essentially
autobiographical, Dillon in his paintings having often presented himself as a
pierrot, as James White commented, a figure that enabled him "to enter a dream
world of escape from the present"2. In many of his pierrot pictures, White says,
Dillon "came nearest to a truly poetic expression … far removed from the
realities and pains of daily life", something which, in the late 1960s, was an
escape for him from the Northern conflict, "which was never far from his mind"3.
As in many of Dillon’s pictures, there is a degree of humour in Pierrot with
Painting of King William III. The imagery is deeply ironic, the pierrot being
cast as an Orangeman wearing a traditional bowler hat and orange sash, symbols
of all that the artist abhorred about Ulster life, as is the portrait of King
William of Orange, triumphantly astride his traditional white horse, an image
that harks back to a distant past that Dillon felt no part of. The expression on
the pierrot’s face appears to be of benign amusement, but in fact represents
incredulity at what is happening in his native land. The brisk handling of paint
throughout - notably in the figure of King William and the head of the pierrot -
indicates the spontaneity of the picture’s execution and, sadly in this
instance, recalls James White’s observation that Dillon knew that the way to
make a work of art was "to pluck the image hot out of experience"4. As in this
picture, the juxtaposition of different images, which appear to have little
direct connection, is a device frequently employed by Dillon. It was an
influence he took from Irish High Crosses of the Early Christian period and,
later, absorbed from Chagall, whom he much admired5.
1 John Hewitt, ‘Under Forty: some Ulster Artists’, Now in Ulster, 1944, p.34
2 James White, Gerard Dillon: An Illustrated Biography, 1994
3 Ibid, p.103
4 Ibid, p.104
5 Gerard Dillon, ‘The Artist Speaks’, Envoy, February 1951, p.9
Dr S. B. Kennedy
Belfast, March 2004
€30,000-€40,000 (£20,100-£26,800 sterling approx.)
Auction Location:
Ireland
Previewing Details:
Saturday & Sunday, April 24 & 25, 10am-6pm; Monday April 26, 10am to 9pm; Tuesday April 27 (day of sale) 10am to 2pm.
Additional Fees:
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