Gerard Dillon (1916-1971) Connemara Quayside with Fishermen...
Hammer
€30,000
Gerard Dillon (1916-1971) Connemara Quayside with Fishermen Oil on canvas laid down on board, 35 x 40cm (13¾ x 15¾'')
This outstanding painting centres on a fishing boat moored at the quay in Roundstone, Connemara, looking eastwards. The figures along the quay are dressed in traditional local clothing and the vessel is a Connemara Nobby, one of the craft introduced on the Aran Islands and along the coast late in the late 19th century for herring and mackerel fishing. There's a wonderful freshness and spontaneity to the treatment, with great feeling for light and atmosphere.
Discovering Connemara was one of the most important events in Gerard Dillon's artistic life. The perpetually changing light and colour entranced and challenged him, and the West seemed to allow him a freedom he hadn't really found elsewhere. His stays in Connemara, he wrote in 1964 have always been heaven, even when the bottom of heaven fell out and about us drenching everything around. He first encountered the region on a cycling tour with Ernie Atkins in 1939 and it amazed him as being somewhere genuinely other, raw and compelling. And something more than he had seen in the work of other artists. He was not particularly interested in picturesque scenery, more in the texture of the living landscape and its people. From that point on revisited and stayed there regularly, in Roundstone and on the tiny island of Inishlacken, and around Moyard, north of Clifden.
Belfast-born, Dillon was the son of a Catholic, fiercely Anti-Treaty Republican mother. Drawn toward art and theatre, he quietly rebelled against the rigid confines of his upbringing, though it should be said he and his siblings were always close and mutually supportive, particularly he and his sister Mollie. He later lived in the basement flat of her house in London, on Abbey Road. Apprenticed as a house painter - a means of escaping school that became a means of making a living - he aspired to be an artist. A gifted natural draughtsman, he was resolutely against academic instruction, determined to find his own way. That perhaps largely accounts for the extraordinary, unfiltered directness of his work, which retained a childlike simplicity, in the way that van Gogh's did. His painting is also tremendously vivid and tactile.
A modest, idealistic and determined individual, Dillon gained a wide following, and had numerous friends and supporters in the arts community. He makes fictionalised appearances in the work of writers Aidan Higgins and Gerard Keenan. His work features in numerous public and private collections and was the subject of several retrospective exhibitions including Karen Reihill's major show Gerard Dillon, Art and Friendships at Adam's in 2013.
Aidan Dunne, August 2026
Hammer
€30,000
Gerard Dillon (1916-1971) Connemara Quayside with Fishermen Oil on canvas laid down on board, 35 x 40cm (13¾ x 15¾'')
This outstanding painting centres on a fishing boat moored at the quay in Roundstone, Connemara, looking eastwards. The figures along the quay are dressed in traditional local clothing and the vessel is a Connemara Nobby, one of the craft introduced on the Aran Islands and along the coast late in the late 19th century for herring and mackerel fishing. There's a wonderful freshness and spontaneity to the treatment, with great feeling for light and atmosphere.
Discovering Connemara was one of the most important events in Gerard Dillon's artistic life. The perpetually changing light and colour entranced and challenged him, and the West seemed to allow him a freedom he hadn't really found elsewhere. His stays in Connemara, he wrote in 1964 have always been heaven, even when the bottom of heaven fell out and about us drenching everything around. He first encountered the region on a cycling tour with Ernie Atkins in 1939 and it amazed him as being somewhere genuinely other, raw and compelling. And something more than he had seen in the work of other artists. He was not particularly interested in picturesque scenery, more in the texture of the living landscape and its people. From that point on revisited and stayed there regularly, in Roundstone and on the tiny island of Inishlacken, and around Moyard, north of Clifden.
Belfast-born, Dillon was the son of a Catholic, fiercely Anti-Treaty Republican mother. Drawn toward art and theatre, he quietly rebelled against the rigid confines of his upbringing, though it should be said he and his siblings were always close and mutually supportive, particularly he and his sister Mollie. He later lived in the basement flat of her house in London, on Abbey Road. Apprenticed as a house painter - a means of escaping school that became a means of making a living - he aspired to be an artist. A gifted natural draughtsman, he was resolutely against academic instruction, determined to find his own way. That perhaps largely accounts for the extraordinary, unfiltered directness of his work, which retained a childlike simplicity, in the way that van Gogh's did. His painting is also tremendously vivid and tactile.
A modest, idealistic and determined individual, Dillon gained a wide following, and had numerous friends and supporters in the arts community. He makes fictionalised appearances in the work of writers Aidan Higgins and Gerard Keenan. His work features in numerous public and private collections and was the subject of several retrospective exhibitions including Karen Reihill's major show Gerard Dillon, Art and Friendships at Adam's in 2013.
Aidan Dunne, August 2026
