Louis le Brocquy, H.R.H.A. (b. 1916)

Louis le Brocquy painted portraits of James Joyce on many occasions betwen 1977 and 1995. Le Brocquy comments 'To attempt today a portrait, a single static image of a great artist such as Joyce, appears to me to be futile as well as impertinent. Long conditioned by photography, the cinema and psychology, we now perceive the human individual as facetted, kinetic. And so I have tried as objectively as possible to draw from the depths of paper or canvas these changing and even contradictory traces of the man' (see Exhibition catalogue, Louis le Brocquy, Studies towards an image of James Joyce, Genova, 1977, intro.).