T.P. Flanagan, Irish, Irish, 1929-2011
Title: Boglands 4
Date: 1968-1969
Medium: Oil on board
Dimensions:
184 x 91.5 cm
Signed: on verso (of each board): Boglands 4, T.P.F.
Credit Line: Purchased, 2017
Object Number: NGI.2017.44
DescriptionThe origins of this painting are to be found in a visit by the Flanagans and Seamus Heaney’s family to Gortahawk, Co. Donegal, in 1964. During their holiday there, Flanagan sketched local motifs for paintings, while Heaney jotted down ideas for poems, many of which featured subsequently in his collection Door into the Dark (1969). The exhibition of paintings that resulted from Flanagan’s trip included a work entitled Boglands (for Seamus Heaney). Heaney reciprocated the gesture by penning the poem Bogland: for T.P. Flanagan. Boglands 4, a vertical diptych that dates from Flanagan’s return to Donegal in 1968, resembles the earlier painting, but is more abstract in character. Its orientation allows the artist to address the constituent elements and layers of the bog, and adjust his palette from top to bottom. ‘As an artist, he has gone his own way’ Heaney wrote of Flanagan in 1995, ‘explored the Irish landscape and enhanced Irish landscape painting through the discovery and elaboration of an individual style’.
ProvenanceThe Artist, and thence by descent. Purchased at auction, Sotheby's, Irish Art, 27 September 2017