Catalogue of paintings

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There's something reveric and poetic about the entire body of work, as is evidenced by le Brocquy's frequent portraits of fellow Irish greats such as Oscar Wilde, W B Yeats and Samuel Beckett. Yet le Brocquy's poetry is always rigorously painterly and visual. He never falls off into literary illustration or compositional melodrama. As Francis Bacon once remarked, le Brocquy continues to be "obsessed by figuration outside and on the other side of illustration". And there is certainly a thematic otherness haunting all of his painterly and graphic work, whether it be the psychologically incisive portraits, ritualised figure gatherings, lyrical still-lifes or the long series of mist-drenched watercolour landscapes. Robert Clark, The Guardian, London, May 6, 2006