*Maurice MacGonigal PRHA (1900-1979) Clifden, Connemara Oil on Canvas, 101 x 126cm (39¾ x 49½) Signed, inscribed verso (Painted from the D’Arcy Monument o’er looking the town of Clifden; Monument to John D’Arcy (1785-1839) the founder & owner of the Clifden Estates. The hill is known as Cloghaunard and the monument commenced soon after his death about 1841). The Estate being burdened with pre-existing debts and post famine debts added, it crippled the estate and after D’Arcy’s death his son, the Rev Hyacinth D’Arcy (then Rector of Clifden in the Omey Union) was bankrupted, the estates were sold through the ‘Encumbered Estates’ to the Eyre family of east County Galway and Bath for £21,245 and again became encumbered with further debts, resold before 1900, and by 1919 acquired locally, the house (Clifden Castle) became ruinous, and the Land Commission redistributed the agricultural land to local farmers following a period of agitation. The artist had frequently painted a view of the town from the vicinity of the monument but never found a day nor time when he could get the pictorial value of a ‘spring tide’ to give a cohesion of pictorial elements including the distant Twelve Bens. By this I mean that the light and colour as well as reflections from the inrushing water were not all present together. In his ‘70s by then he insisted we find the date when a particular ‘spring tide’ would fall so that he could work on a larger canvas. He prepared both the stretcher (the timber internal frame if you like) and the canvas himself - visits to ship’s chandlers for the correct canvas weave and art suppliers went on for quite a time. Using an old German art book (Max Friedländer) on ‘artists materials’ for the correct ‘recipe’ he primed the canvas flat and then attached it to the stretcher framework - the job of transporting it by van (our estate car being too small) was an adventure. Climbing that steepish hill with the canvas holding onto the stretcher framework was memorable to me as the carrier. Having to fetch his painting box laden with materials was doubly memorable. After some hours he indicated that he was done - for safety I photographed the work ‘in situ’ (my polaroid camera was at least useful) .. said photograph survived intact in the artist’s file and was only coincidentally re-found very recently in the artist’s archive which had been retrieved by Professor Katharine Crouan who had written the original MacGonigal catalogue for the exhibition in the Dublin City - Hugh Lane Gallery many years ago. The artist was using the oddity of perspective of the two churches in the town to create a powerful diagonal and a lesser diagonal of the road from the town towards the Sky Road and the monument. It’s or their purpose was to stress the decorative elements of the town houses which have the pictorial quality of being very tall in front and even taller in some cases at the rear owing to the cliff-like nature of the site on which the town was based by Alexander Nimmo’s designs for the landlord (D’Arcy) then developing the hamlet into a town. The artist avoids the dangers of centering the composition with another diagonal of the banked elements of the backs of the houses as well as the smaller ‘cross cutting’ Ardbear Road to the right of the composition. The middle distances are those of the boglands and small fields and the massive effects of the Twelve Bens (in Irish na Benna Beola) whose sharp peaked quartzite summits form the backbone of Connemara and give and gave such an impetus to artists working to the aesthetic ideals of ‘en plein air’ forming the rise above the horizon line of this work. The foreground of the tide suggested to the artist that it was about to “turn and recede” so he pushes on to give reflections in the water in order to pull the entire composition together. The artist spent over 50 years of his painting life looking at and painting, drawing and colour-noting the qualities of the Connemara landscape, and appropriately he lies in Connemara forever looking at a beloved land and seascape. Ciarán MacGonigal, August 2022 * Please note this lot is imported under Temporary Admission. It will attract import duty of 13.5%.