Beschreibung:

Patrick Swift (1927-1983) Girl in a Garden (c.1951/2) Oil on canvas, 134.5 x 106.5cm (53 X 42) Signed; title inscribed on label verso Exhibited: Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal exhibition, Palácio Foz, Lisbon, Oct/Nov 2001; The Crawford Gallery, Cork, Dec 2001/February 2002 . Literature: "Patrick Swift (1927-1983) An Irish Painter in Portugal, Crawford Gallery, Cork, 2001, p.31 (full page illustration). "Girl in a Garden" dates to the early 1950s and forms part of an interesting body of early work created in Swift's studio on Hatch Street, Dublin . The painting depicts the artist's girlfriend American poet Claire McAllister seated in the garden of the studio. Together they formed part of an influential Dublin cultural set that included Anthony Cronin, Patrick Kavanagh, Nano Reid and Brendan Behan among others. Claire McAllister was then a student at Trinity College and she lived in the same house as Deirdre McDonagh whose flat with its grand piano became a favourite post-pub haunt. They met and soon moved to a large flat in a Georgian House on Hatch Street with Swift subletting the front half to the painter Patrick Pye as a studio. Their relationship came to an end several years later after Swift was introduced to the beautiful Oonagh Ryan by her brother John Ryan (Envoy Magazine, The Bailey Pub etc) in May 1952 and later that year Swift left Claire and followed Oonagh to London. Swift had met Lucian Freud in 1949 and by 1950 Lucian was coming regularly to Ireland due to his courtship with his future wife Lady Caroline Blackwood of Clandeboye Estate in Northern Ireland and he used to come around in the mornings to the Hatch Street Studio to paint. Freud's early influence on Swift - his junior by five years - is very evident in this work which is dispassionate, stylised and severe. Swift however was less preoccupied with texture and more concerned with tone; a dominant feature in the present example. At first glance the subject appears somewhat ordinary set against a frugal palette but closer examination reveals an environment that is more surreal than natural and a subject that is imbued with tension and ambiguity rather than indifference. Claire sits perched on the edge of the garden steps slightly below the artist's line of vision and somewhat dwarfed by an elephantine invasion of vegetation from a neighbouring garden. The rickety patio door hangs open and there is a sense of detachment in spite of their obvious proximity. In 1950 Swift showed his first works in public at the IELA; the following year at the same show his paintings were singled out by Dublin Magazine for their exceptional technical ability and 'uncompromising clarity of vision which eschews the accidental or the obvious or the sentimental'. His first solo exhibition came in 1952 at the Waddington Galleries, Dublin. Tony Gray,the Irish Times art critic was quoted in Time Magazine (October 20, 1952) Swift unearths [from his subjects] not a story nor a decorative pattern, nor even a mood, but some sort of tension which is a property of their existence. Later in the 1950s Swift and Freud met again in London, where he coedited a literary and arts journal, X, and mingled with other leading artists of the period including Francis Bacon John Minton Frank Auerbach David Andrews, Leon Kossoff In 1962 Swift and his wife visited the Algarve where they eventually settled and established Porches Pottery. He continued to exhibit on occasion in Dublin; his portrait of Patrick Kavanagh (CIÉ Collection) was shown at the RHA in 1968. A significant solo show was held in Lisbon in 1974 but it was not until 1993 (the centenary of his death) that Irish audiences could enjoy his work en masse at a major retrospective in IMMA. Further exhibitions have since taken place including a show in Lisbon and Cork in 2001 which included this work. We are grateful to Stephen and Veronica Jane O'Mara whose writings on the artist formed the basis of this catalogue note.