Louis le Brocquy (1916) – Irish Artist

Louis le Brocquy was born in Dublin in 1916. From 1934 to 1938 he studied Chemistry at Trinity College, Dublin and then left Ireland to study the collections in European museums and galleries before settling for a time in London. He began painting in 1939. In 1958 he married the Irish painter Anne Madden and the couple settled in Carros, France where they lived until their return to Dublin in 2000.

According to an editorial in The Irish Times ‘ This self-taught artist has come to be recognised both at home and internationally as the foremost Irish painter of the 20th century’.

Acclaimed for his evocative heads of literary figures and fellow artists, including W.B. Yeats, James Joyce and his friends Samuel Beckett, Francis Bacon, Seamus Heaney and Bono, in recent year le Brocquy’s early Tinker subjects and Family paintings, have attracted headline attention in the international art area marking him as the fourth painter in Ireland and Britain to be evaluated within a very select group of artists, alongside Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Francis Bacon.