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'Tinker period' (c. 1945 - 1948)
In November 1946 le Brocquy moved to London, begins exhibiting at Gimpel Fils and becomes a prominent member of the London art world, including such artists such as William Scott, Graham Sutherland, Lucian Freud and his friend Francis Bacon. Le Brocquy also befriended the polish painter Jankel Adler (1895-1949), whose cubist style had an important influence on his work in the late 1940s. His interest in travellers dates back to to the war years in Ireland and continued throughout his early years in London. The artist encounters the 'tinkers' near Tullamore, County Offaly (August 1945). The vitality, mystery and wildness of these travelling people is admired by le Brocquy: 'Most of all I was impressed by their insistence on freedom - freedom from every external regulation - observing only their own tribal rules, their tradition. Not, perhaps, altogether unlike the independence of the artist within society'. Described as the once-dispossessed people of confiscations wandering without security of land, Earnán O'Malley remarks: 'They are lithe and hardy, sharp in feature, and capable of sudden calls on endurance from their uncertain way of life in a difficult climate. With them primitive emotions are easily aroused and expressed; their woman drink and fight as readily as their men, and bear children without halting the day's journey. Their aloofness, intractability, and fierce independence interested le Brocquy. They are, he could see, outside of the closely organised life of the parish unit, looked on with mistrust and suspicion ... They become a symbol of the individual as opposed to organised, settled society ... For the creative worker they could represent the artist who deals in the unexpected and the unrecognised and who suffuses with meaning familiar things.' ... | READ CHRONOLOGY OF A LIFE: 'TINKER' PERIOD
