I must have been dreaming that morning. It was the spring of 1973 and Thomas Kilroy, the playwright, was lecturing on W.B. Yeats and his contemporaries in Theatre M in the Arts Block in UCD. As he began to read from a Yeats poem, I started to pay attention. It was high-toned stuff from the second-last stanza of ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, a late poem with a line beginning: ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory’ and another starting with: ‘We three alone in modern times.’

It seemed almost disappointing when Yeats went on to say that everything they had done ‘must come from contact with the soil’, and when he invoked ‘the noble and the beggarman’. Nonetheless, I liked the high and uncompromising way he established his presence in the poem and that of his friends.

The poem describes Yeats in old age seeing portraits of his dead friends in the gallery. In this poem and in ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ - both poems in eight-lined, numbered stanzas that feel as though they were created for a stately occasion - it is strange how much raw feeling emerges, as though the lofty voice felt a need to soften as the poem came to a close.

You that would judge me do not judge alone

This book or that, come to this hallowed place

Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;

Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends

And say my glory was I had such friends.

When I first read this poem, under the guidance of Thomas Kilroy, I felt its great distance from any world I knew or would ever know. Yeats saw no reason to understate his own fame, his own importance. His pride was aristocratic, the sound of a conquering hero in old age. His experience seemed deliberate, the visit to the gallery ceremonial.

It was so far from any common experience, and yet such flashes of recognition can happen to anyone who looks at old photographs or, indeed, at work by painters who have died in recent years.

It must be three years ago now – we can measure everything by the pandemic! – in those empty days between Christmas and the New Year when I ventured for no obvious reason into the National Gallery. The first room I went into had work by Irish painters of the twentieth century. It made sense that this cohort included Louis le Brocquy, Patrick Collins, Patrick Scott and Tony O’Malley.

Having studied the actual paintings, I stood back and took stock of the room. These four painters had not been my friends, but I had known them. Or maybe it is more true to say that I paid attention to them every chance I got, and I remember each encounter.    

In a time of dullness and conformity, more than writers or hippies or rock stars, Irish painters were figures of independence and glamour. These four I have mentioned and others such as Anne Yeats and Camille Souter lived in a time and in a world when painting and print-making still had power and autonomy and meant something in a small country and a small city.

Most of these painters avoided London and New York. Many of them depended on the Dublin galleries and loyal Irish collectors. They spent time, however, on the European mainland, or, in the case of O’Malley, in Cornwall and in the Canary Islands. 

Usually, also, the painters lived outside Dublin. If they had a show opening, they could be found in bars and restaurants and galleries in Dublin for an intense period, and then they would disappear.

Most of these artists were serious readers and wanted to talk about poetry and novels rather than discuss their work. Some of them were free spirits who had lived untidy lives. They were good talkers, unconstrained, funny. 

Louis le Brocquy was fascinated by the intricacies of the visible world. I wonder if his first time on a helicopter was when he went to Inishvickilaune, the Blasket Island owned by Charlie Haughey. As he set out to leave the island, he told me, Haughey was the same size as he was, and then as the helicopter rose, his host became more and more a speck. That transformation intrigued the painter. He spoke about it with slow care and precision as though it was something that he would need to take into account more and more.

I remember Patrick Scott in one of the pubs in Newbliss that artists at Annaghmakerrig often frequented after dinner in the 1980s. Scott had a habit of looking as though the world pleased him. I watched him studying everyone who appeared, taking them in as another visual sensation sent to delight him. He told me that he had bought a plane ticket that would take him around the world, and I imagined how much pleasure he would get from that, a pleasure that he distilled with impeccable care and tact in the paintings and prints he made.

There was a time when I thought his work too tasteful, too close to design, but I no longer think that. His imagery, his colours, his tones, have a purity, a sense of contained feeling, that I have come to love.

When I met Tony O’Malley for the first time, he told me an amazing story. He had worked as a bank clerk in Enniscorthy in the 1950s, lodging at Hayes’s in Court Street. Years later, in Cornwall, when he and his wife Jane were putting together a kind of inventory of his work, they saw that a great deal was missing, especially drawings and gouaches made in the 1950s.

In the 1980s when O’Malley had a touring show, he came back to visit Enniscorthy where he bumped into the daughter of the house where he had lodged. She said to him, almost casually: ‘By the way, that suitcase you left behind is still in the attic.’ It was filled with the work he thought he had lost. It included many drawings and gouaches of places around Enniscorthy, including Vinegar Hill.

Patrick Collins, even as he walked the streets of Dublin, dreamed of the shifting light over Sligo. He was a debonair figure. Like the other three painters I have mentioned, he had a great gaze. It was as though nothing escaped him. In his novel ‘Balcony of Europe’, Aidan Higgins used elements of Collins in the creation of his protagonist, took him to Spain and gave him many fictional experiences.

Collins, when I met him first, had just bought a copy of John Banville’s ‘The Newton Letter’ in Fred Hanna’s bookshop. The book was an unusual shape and that had attracted him. And then he had been amazed by the writing. That was what he wanted to talk about.

Using thinly applied grey and blue paint, Collins created a frame within a frame for his paintings. All the energy was in the rich and subtle undertones. His paintings are like something emerging from memory, or a landscape slowly revealing itself to the light after a morning’s drizzle, in a moment where elements can seem to stand out, almost glisten. The paintings flirt with transcendence and unabashed romanticism, but there are brushstrokes that are exact, making images that are close to solid, as though Collins were a kind of cartographer.

Like the other painters, Collins didn’t talk about his work if he could help it. He guarded his imaginative terrain. His iconography was private and uncertain. Who can say if the next painting will be as mysterious and richly textured as the last? How can you stop an evolved, personal style from becoming a pale parody of itself?

That was the risk these painters took. 

Colm Tóibín (June 2022)