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Procession series (c. 1984 -1992)
In 1954 le Brocquy painted Children in a wood, inspired by a painting by the 17th-century Dutch artist Nicolaes Maes. In 1962 he painted another painting of children, Procession with Lilies, prompted by a photograph which had been sent to him years earlier in 1939. These two images of processions inspired a further series of work in the 1980s and 1990s. They demonstrate le Brocquy's continuing interest in the 'group' of figures rather than the isolated individual so prevalent in other works of the 1960s onwards. Dorothy Walker notes: 'The image of these jeunes filles en fleur (et aux fleurs) has been simmering in the artist's mind since 1939 when a friend in Dublin sent him, to France where he was then living, a newspaper cutting from the Evening Herald showing a group of young girls in white First Communion dresses, coming around a corner, laughing and carrying white lilies. The caption to the photograph was "Schoolgirls returning from Church after the blessing of the Lilies on the Feast of St Anthony." The date on the newspaper was 16 June 1939, the date of the publication of Finnegan's Wake ... He was also struck by the complementary paradoxes in the image, the togetherness and the scattered individuality: all the faces facing forward, all caught up not merely in a communal event but also in a common physical movement, the movement of a flock, in their rush around the corner of the street. Later on, he was also struck by the haphazard conjunction of dates, that this epiphanic Dublin photograph should have been published on the same day as Finnegan's Wake. The image of happy, excited children was sharpened by the poignancy of the date, Bloomsday 1939, so soon before the doomsday of war, almost the last Bloomsday of Joyce's life ... Le Brocquy has spent so much of his working life inside Joyce's head, as it were, that this simple, accidental newspaper cutting thus assumed further significance for him. It seemed to him to be an illumination of Joyce's own words, a "fluid succession of presents", a chain of present moments, a river of life.' ... | CHRONOLOGY OF A LIFE: PROCESSION
Peter Murray. Eros and Thanatos. Louis le Brocquy’s ‘Procession’ paintings
Discussing the contrasting connection between the two themes, le Brocquy says: 'It was not until quite recently that I consciously recognised a relationship between these two youthful processions ... two sides of the same phenomenal coin: one a Joycean charade, a fleeting actuality in a continuous progression of present moments, the other, as I see it, a constant condition of being, a return in the mind to the sensuous magic of childhood, when meaning lay within each hollow tree and time was a measure of eternity ... Having a slow-moving mind, however, I perceived only gradually those hidden elements which since 1954 tentatively drew me to the little Maes painting, drew me behind the joy and beyond the experimental game of childhood into the shadows of presentiment, of human emergence and disappearance, of sound grown silent'. The art historian Peter Murray observes: 'He talks about the slowness with which the meaning of the series was exposed to him, as he painted them ... However he is reluctant to describe the paired series as representing sacred and profane themes, preferring to emphasise their inner qualities ... These works follow the artist's conscious concern to deconstruct the visible world, his almost scientific attempts to penetrate the nature of what lies beneath outward appearance. Going back to his early training as a chemist, le Brocquy emphasises the nature of experimentation in their making, of letting paint take its own course: "it seems to me that anything worthwhile which occurs in my work has come out of a series of supervised accidents, by the painting answering back." While accident may play an important role, what is clear is that these are paintings of great seriousness of intention, and of execution'. Asked whether these works are to be viewed as parables, the artist says: 'The mystical or religious connotations, you speak of, while clear enough, dissolve in my mind into undefined intimations and presentiment - wonder of a kind. If the grapes you speak of could be a chalice, they remain a bunch of grapes. In the last painting I made [Children in a Wood IV (1992; A.R. 597)], that background figure in the wood got his knife out on his own and I've no idea what he is going to do with it! The central figure may be acting as Nicholaes Maes intended, but, as I see it, his gesture is ambiguous. When painting, I have no preconceptions. When I'm working, I learn from painting itself'.
