Patrick (1910) Collins Sold at Auction Prices

Painter, b. 1910 - d. 1994

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    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) RELEASE MONA LISA, 1986sold
      May. 29, 2023

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) RELEASE MONA LISA, 1986

      Est: €3,000 - €5,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) RELEASE MONA LISA, 1986 oil on canvas; (irregular) signed, titled and dated lower centre h:24  w:27 in.

      Whyte's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) FLOWERPIECE NO. 1, c.1967sold
      May. 29, 2023

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) FLOWERPIECE NO. 1, c.1967

      Est: €4,000 - €6,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) FLOWERPIECE NO. 1, c.1967 oil on board signed lower right; with Ritchie Hendriks Gallery label on reverse h:9  w:12 in. Provenance: Ritchie Hendricks Gallery, Dublin; Whence purchased, May 1967, by M. Erlanger; Art Collection of David Erlanger and Jean Wilter, Litchfield Auctions, 28 February 2023, lot 26; Private collection

      Whyte's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) MOONRISE ON THE LAKEsold
      Mar. 06, 2023

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) MOONRISE ON THE LAKE

      Est: €12,000 - €18,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) MOONRISE ON THE LAKE oil on canvas signed lower left; titled on reverse h:26  w:37 in. Patrick Collins occupies a singular position in 20th century Irish art. On the one hand, his work is exceptionally, undeniably Irish. He was fond of using the term Celtic as a general description, without strictly defining it or getting hung up about it. On the other hand, while his paintings reflect aspects of the Irish landscape, environment and character, he was a man apart, who didn't identify with any school or movement. But his instincts were infallibly attuned to the atmospherics of the moisture-laden Irish light, endless tracts of bogland and stony hillsides, and the stark, existential plight of those, human and animal, on rural small-holdings. What he managed to do was to paint an almost mythical Ireland, but one rooted in the real. His colours are muddied, misty, dreamy. Motifs assert themselves with a stubborn, rugged presence. A roll-call of those motifs incudes, variously, stones, pools, a bird, an animal, a cottage and, as here, the moon. Usually, compositions occupy a kind of frame with a frame, as though the painting is a vision conjured up from a primordial mist. That is subtly the case in this painting, in which the light of the rising moon has a stark, definitive clarity to it. Born in Dromore West in Sligo, Collins ran wild in nature as a child and then, in his teens, had to cope with life in an orphanage. While the regime was not, by his own account, harsh, he felt imprisoned, and remained ever after resistant to institutional authority. Working as a clerk, he lived in a tower in Howth Castle and aspired to be a writer, only gradually coming around to painting. In his later work he became increasingly interested in the use of line, largely, he explained, because of his growing respect for traditional Chinese painting. Aidan Dunne, February 2023

      Whyte's
    • PATRICK COLLINS - FLOWERPIECE - O/Bsold
      Feb. 28, 2023

      PATRICK COLLINS - FLOWERPIECE - O/B

      Est: $5,000 - $8,000

      Patrick Collins, Ireland, 1910/11-1994, Flowerpiece no. 01, oil on panel, signed lower right, Verso labeled The Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, May 1967

      Litchfield Auctions
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Old lady in window Oil on Canvas, 25.5 x 30.5cm (10 x 12) Signed Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, label verso.sold
      Sep. 28, 2022

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Old lady in window Oil on Canvas, 25.5 x 30.5cm (10 x 12) Signed Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, label verso.

      Est: €2,500 - €3,500

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Old lady in window Oil on Canvas, 25.5 x 30.5cm (10 x 12) Signed Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, label verso.

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Mallard Oil on canvas, 20 x 25cm (7¾ x 9¾'') Signed lower rightsold
      Jun. 01, 2022

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Mallard Oil on canvas, 20 x 25cm (7¾ x 9¾'') Signed lower right

      Est: €1,500 - €2,500

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Mallard Oil on canvas, 20 x 25cm (7¾ x 9¾'') Signed lower right

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910 - 1994) Vase of flowers Mixed media, 19.5 x 15cm (7½ x 6) Signed and dated (19)'90sold
      Jun. 01, 2022

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910 - 1994) Vase of flowers Mixed media, 19.5 x 15cm (7½ x 6) Signed and dated (19)'90

      Est: €800 - €1,200

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910 - 1994) Vase of flowers Mixed media, 19.5 x 15cm (7½ x 6) Signed and dated (19)'90

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Fig Tree 1 Crayon 18 x 20cm (7¼ x 7¾) Signed Provenance: with the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, Private Collectionsold
      Mar. 30, 2022

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Fig Tree 1 Crayon 18 x 20cm (7¼ x 7¾) Signed Provenance: with the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, Private Collection

      Est: €750 - €1,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Fig Tree 1 Crayon 18 x 20cm (7¼ x 7¾) Signed Provenance: with the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, Private Collection

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994) Mountainside, Wicklow Oil on board, 30 x 40cm (11¾ x 15¾'') Signedsold
      Mar. 30, 2022

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994) Mountainside, Wicklow Oil on board, 30 x 40cm (11¾ x 15¾'') Signed

      Est: €5,000 - €7,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994) Mountainside, Wicklow Oil on board, 30 x 40cm (11¾ x 15¾'') Signed

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) TEA THINGS, 1977sold
      Mar. 07, 2022

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) TEA THINGS, 1977

      Est: €2,000 - €3,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) TEA THINGS, 1977 oil on canvas signed and dated lower left; with Tom Caldwell Gallery label on reverse h:10  w:9 in.

      Whyte's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Water Lilies Oil on canvas, 40 x 43cm (15¾ x 17'') Signed Provenance: Sale, Whyte's, Dublin, 21/09/2004, lot 115.sold
      Dec. 08, 2021

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Water Lilies Oil on canvas, 40 x 43cm (15¾ x 17'') Signed Provenance: Sale, Whyte's, Dublin, 21/09/2004, lot 115.

      Est: €10,000 - €15,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Water Lilies Oil on canvas, 40 x 43cm (15¾ x 17'') Signed Provenance: Sale, Whyte's, Dublin, 21/09/2004, lot 115.

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) OLD LADY IN THE WINDOWsold
      Nov. 29, 2021

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) OLD LADY IN THE WINDOW

      Est: €3,000 - €4,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) OLD LADY IN THE WINDOW oil on canvas signed lower right; with Tom Caldwell Gallery label on reverse h:10  w:12 in.

      Whyte's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) DUBLIN BAY, 1963sold
      Nov. 29, 2021

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) DUBLIN BAY, 1963

      Est: €15,000 - €20,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) DUBLIN BAY, 1963 oil on board signed lower right h:24  w:30 in. Provenance: Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, 1964; Private collection Exhibited: Possibly in the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, 1963, under the title Summer's Evening, Dublin Bay); Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, 1964; Patrick Collins Retrospective, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, 1982 This is a striking, atmospheric painting that captures a significant shift in the work of Patrick Collins, one of the foremost Irish artists of the 20th century. The composition is close to that of Bridge and Trees, painted a year earlier, a notably more expressionist, agitated and, as Dr Frances Ruane noted, 'Yeatsian' painting. In Dublin Bay, Collins has moved decisively towards a calm, atmospheric evocation of space - a hallmark of his mature style. The impressively rugged-looking mounds of the trees dominate the dark foreground and partly obscure the distant north shore of the bay, sparkling with lights in the encroaching dusk, evident in the subtle grey halo that frames the composition. Mist from the sea softens the outline of Howth Head and merges sea and sky. The use of intractable sculptural masses, together with layered expanses of generally muted colour charged with a degree of luminosity, comprise the essence of Collins' approach from this point onwards. Born in Dromore West in Sligo, Collins was substantially formed by his early years of freedom running wild in the rural landscape. He felt understandably constrained as a teenage boarder at St Vincent's Orphanage in Glasnevin and subsequently, working as a clerk in Dublin, and he gravitated towards literature and art, idolising Joyce. Living for a time in a tower in Howth Castle, he aspired to write and took art lessons. By the early 1950s he felt he was finding his voice through painting and his first solo show at the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery in 1956 was very successful. In his paintings he managed, without a hint of nostalgia, to convey the essence of an Ireland mythical and real, ancient and modern. He was instinctively attuned to the atmospherics of bogland and ocean, and the misty, watery Irish light. A private, even reclusive man, he almost shunned publicity during his lifetime but has long been recognised as a major Irish painter. Aidan Dunne, November 2021

      Whyte's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) TEA THINGS, 1977sold
      Nov. 29, 2021

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) TEA THINGS, 1977

      Est: €3,000 - €4,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) TEA THINGS, 1977 oil on canvas signed and dated lower left; with Tom Caldwell Gallery label on reverse h:10  w:9 in.

      Whyte's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) APPLES, 1961sold
      Sep. 27, 2021

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) APPLES, 1961

      Est: €10,000 - €15,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) APPLES, 1961 oil on board with Ritchie Hendriks Gallery and Arts Council labels on reverse h:15.25  w:19.75 in. Provenance: Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, Dublin, 1961; Collection of Sir Basil Goulding; Tom Caldwell Galleries, Dublin, 1982; Private collection Exhibited: Ritchie Hendriks Gallery, August 1971, catalogue no. 7; 'Irish Imagination', ROSC 1971, catalogue no. 14; ’Patrick Collins: Retrospective Exhibition’, Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, touring exhibition, Cork, Dublin and Belfast, 1982, catalogue no. 12 Sir William Basil Goulding (1909–1982) was an Irish cricketer, squash player, art collector and prominent businessman. Goulding was the founding Chairperson of the Contemporary Irish Art Society in 1962, along with Gordon Lambert, Cecil King, Stanley Mosse, James White and Michael Scott. The enthusiasm and vision of these founding members of the society was the catalyst which led to the development of many important art collections in Ireland. The purpose of the society was to encourage a greater level of patronage of living Irish artists which, at the time, was extremely low. This was mainly achieved by raising funds to purchase artworks by living artists, which were then donated to public collections. The first purchase in 1962 was an important painting by Patrick Scott, donated to the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. Over the following 12 years the society purchased 37 works for the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, until in 1974, Dublin Corporation started to provide an annual purchasing fund for the gallery. Following a trip to Brittany, Patrick Collins exhibited his first paintings based on Bronze Age standing stones, menhirs, at the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery in 1961. They became a staple subject for him in the following years in a long, intermittent series of paintings. Given the nature and development of his work one can see why he was drawn to such durable stone presences in the landscape. This exceptional still life also featured in that show, from which it was purchased by Basil Goulding. Audaciously simple in its format, the stark, unadorned study of two apples is atmospherically rich in a way that is characteristic of Collins at his best. It has often been noted that he did not so much paint objects as the aura and spaces around them. Here, the overlapping central forms have a monumental, rugged density that complements the fruits' fragile transience, indicated by the flush of light and colour. Typically, the light seems to radiate from them, rather than falling upon them. As Collins paints them, they are as heroic and timeless as megaliths. Born in Dromore West in Sligo, Collins forever identified with his early years of freedom in the wild rural landscape. He was temperamentally unsuited to be a teenage boarder at St Vincent's Orphanage in Glasnevin. Later, working as a clerk in Dublin he gravitated towards the world of art and literature. Living in a tower in Howth Castle, he thought of writing and took art lessons. As he recalled, by the beginning of the 1950s he began to find his way in painting and had work accepted by the Irish Exhibition of Living Art. His first, very successful solo show at Ritchie Hendriks Gallery came in 1956. A quintessentially Irish artist, from early on his painting seems to evoke an Ireland both mythical and real, romanticised but rigorously unsentimental. Isolated subjects - from human figures to dwellings, fields to birds - emerge as if from a primordeal mist, stubbornly asserting themselves. A painting can visualise a whole world. A private, even reclusive man, Collins almost shunned publicity during his lifetime but has long been recognised as a central figure in 20th century Irish art.

      Whyte's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) - Boat Standing on the Lakesold
      Jun. 02, 2021

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) - Boat Standing on the Lake

      Est: €12,000 - €14,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Boat Standing on the Lake Oil on canvas, 51 x 59cm (20 x 23¼'') Signed Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast, label verso. Born in Dromore West, Co Sligo Patrick Collins' early childhood years were, despite his family's relative poverty and practical setbacks, redeemed by the freedom he found in the natural world around him. Alas, he was dispatched to St Vincent's Orphanage in Glasnevin around 1925, and felt imprisoned. There followed 20 years as an insurance clerk in Dublin, during which time he read voraciously - he initially aspired to be a writer - and found himself fascinated by art, attending lectures and classes. From the mid-1940s he lived in a tower at Howth Castle, and began to exhibit paintings annually at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art from 1950, with solo shows at the then Ritchie Hendriks Gallery from 1956 and later with Tom Caldwell Galleries. The writer Aidan Higgins, a close friend during those years, recalled in 1982: He painted the shadows of things, avoiding the direct face... In truth he excelled at evoking the spaces between and around things, capturing the watery, palpable texture of Irish light wrapped around stubborn presences in the boggy landscape or the vast ocean: lone trees, stone walls and monuments, smallholdings, farm animals, birds, people, boats and islands, including Hy-Brazil, a shimmering vision in the distance. All imbued with an epic, mythic, elegiac character. Several years in France did not weaken his links to this terrain, though when he returned to Ireland, in the later 1970s, there was perhaps, as in Boat Standing on the Lake, an enhanced luminosity to the light, a willingness to touch on a brighter palette, and a renewed interest in the use of line. Of this period, Frances Ruane has noted his liking for pivoting a composition around a central point.' He does so in this painting (closely related to Little Harbour, exhibited at Tom Caldwell Galleries in 1979) to great effect. The boat in the centre, concisely indicated by the horizontal and vertical accents of its hull and mast, is static, but the energy of the painting is generated by its irresistible link to the sweeping upwards curve of the shore on the right, a curve that loops around the top to bring the eye back down the left of the picture and the foreground accents along the base of the composition. Collins' subtle management of tonality at every stage of this process is masterly. Always an individualist, he never courted official approval, but his reputation never wavered among his peers and he is generally regarded as one of the country's finest 20th century painters, whose contribution to Irish art was immense. A major touring retrospective organised by the Arts Council in 1982 consolidated his reputation. Aiden Dunne, May 2021 Starting Bid: € 8400

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) - Standing Stone, Dingle Peninsulasold
      Jun. 02, 2021

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) - Standing Stone, Dingle Peninsula

      Est: €800 - €1,200

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Standing Stone, Dingle Peninsula Oil on board, 25 x 17cm (9¾ x 6¾'') Signed Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Galleries, Dublin, label verso. Starting Bid: € 560

      Adam's
    • PATRICK COLLINS (IRISH, 1910/11-1994).sold
      Apr. 11, 2021

      PATRICK COLLINS (IRISH, 1910/11-1994).

      Est: $4,000 - $6,000

      Oil on board. Man with Cello. Signed lower right. From a Port Washington, NY collection.

      Clarke Auction Gallery
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Sea and Rain Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed and dated (19)'79 Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast, label verso.sold
      Dec. 09, 2020

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Sea and Rain Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed and dated (19)'79 Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast, label verso.

      Est: €6,000 - €10,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Sea and Rain Oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm (20 x 24'') Signed and dated (19)'79 Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, Belfast, label verso.

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Moon on the Lake Oil on canvas, 37 x 43cm (14½ x 17'') Signedsold
      Dec. 09, 2020

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Moon on the Lake Oil on canvas, 37 x 43cm (14½ x 17'') Signed

      Est: €4,000 - €6,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994) Moon on the Lake Oil on canvas, 37 x 43cm (14½ x 17'') Signed

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins RHA (1911-1994) Potato Patch (AKA Lazy Beds) (1981)sold
      Oct. 27, 2020

      Patrick Collins RHA (1911-1994) Potato Patch (AKA Lazy Beds) (1981)

      Est: €10,000 - €15,000

      Patrick Collins RHA (1911-1994) Potato Patch (AKA Lazy Beds) (1981) oil on canvas signed lower right and dated '81 h:69  w:81 cm. Provenance: Collection of Gillian Bowler; Adam's Dublin, 31st May 2017, Lot 51; Private Collection Exhibited: Patrick Collins Retrospective, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 1992, Catalogue No. 85, later travelling to the Ulster Museum Belfast and The Crawford Gallery, Cork Like Jack B Yeats, Patrick Collins was, throughout his life, influenced by his idyllic childhood years in Co Sligo. Although he was educated in Dublin and began working as an insurance clerk there, he remained attuned to the natural world and, inspired more by the literature than the visual art of his time (he greatly admired Joyce), aspired to become a writer. Gradually, however, he was attracted to the possibilities of painting. A fiercely independent spirit, he always pursued his own path and, although resolutely non-academic in style and substance, his work was consistently infused with a lyrical, romantic quality that set it apart from the Modernism of his contemporaries. He was attached to what he saw as Celtic rather than specifically Irish qualities, though he had a genius for capturing the hazy, shifting, watery character of light and space in the Irish landscape, especially on the boglands of the Midlands and the Western Seaboard. Often he focused on single motifs such as, here, the ridges of the lazy beds in an expansive landscape, or an isolated animal in a field, or isolated smallholdings, or ancient standing stones. In each case the motif is a striking index of the human engagement with place, a subtle manifestation of a long history. Even when he spent some years in France, where he settled in the early 1970s, he remained haunted by the light, textures and ambience of the Irish landscape, and eventually he returned home. His last great artistic adventure was his assimilation of an approach to landscape characteristic of classic Chinese painting. Aidan Dunne, October 2020

      Morgan O'Driscoll
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994)Foul TideOil on board, 63 x 74cm (24¾ x 29'')Signed and dated (19)'78Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, label verso.sold
      Sep. 02, 2020

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994)Foul TideOil on board, 63 x 74cm (24¾ x 29'')Signed and dated (19)'78Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, label verso.

      Est: €6,000 - €10,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994)Foul TideOil on board, 63 x 74cm (24¾ x 29'')Signed and dated (19)'78Provenance: With Tom Caldwell Gallery, label verso.

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994)Moonrise on the LakeOil on canvas, 65 x 92cm (25½ x 36¼'')SignedIn Patrick Collins: A View on Painting, broadcast on RTÉ in 1985, Collins speaks of how ‘The title is nearly always a clue to a picture and it’s thesold
      Sep. 02, 2020

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994)Moonrise on the LakeOil on canvas, 65 x 92cm (25½ x 36¼'')SignedIn Patrick Collins: A View on Painting, broadcast on RTÉ in 1985, Collins speaks of how ‘The title is nearly always a clue to a picture and it’s the

      Est: €15,000 - €20,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1911-1994)Moonrise on the LakeOil on canvas, 65 x 92cm (25½ x 36¼'')SignedIn Patrick Collins: A View on Painting, broadcast on RTÉ in 1985, Collins speaks of how ‘The title is nearly always a clue to a picture and it’s the only effort the artist can make to give you some literary statement that helps you with a picture. It’s called something so therefore you look for something. It’s called ‘A Valley at Sunset’ or ‘The Lakes of Killarney’, ‘A Street Scene’, ‘Still Life’. All these things will help you look for this. But again there’s the contradiction. If you just look for what the title suggests, you’re going to miss the subtlety of the picture which goes beyond that.’Moonrise on the Lake conjures up a romantic, lyrical image but, as Collins himself, suggests it goes beyond a rising moon and lakescape. Look for the lake, look for the moon and they are there but as Collins himself observes the painting goes beyond that. It can be admired for what it is and for what it suggests. Asked, in 1973, about being called an abstract expressionist Collins replied ‘it’s true in a way. When I’m into a picture, I’ll always forget the subject . . . . because it’s the whole flow that important’.Moonrise on the Lake is both representational and abstract. What you see is what you get does not apply here. The more you engage with this work, the more rewarding it is. Peter Murray says ‘The painting can mean different things to different people, a vagueness Collins encouraged; his deliberate use of indistinct forms, engulfed or surrounded by an almost tangible atmosphere, freed the art work from the specific and the everyday’. This composition features a grey-blue lake at night and in the distance, white and pale yellow bands of light shine out against a darker background. But in Collins’s work colour is never a single colour. His palette brilliantly combines different colours and in this instance soft brushstrokes create a quiet movement in the water. In the foreground the brighter, different shapes, the use of strong blacks and whites and the block of colour, with its yellow, greens and reddish-orange give the paining a fine power. Is this the moon’s reflection Is it the artist going beyond that and celebrating form and colour It is both. ‘You don’t believe in the thing that you’re painting, you believe in the thing behind what you’re painting’ said Collins in 1985Opening a Patrick Collins Exhibition in Cork in 1972, poet John Montague spoke of Collins’s work as ‘a dialogue in colour, a mystical experience of light, effecting a bedreamer vision of paint’. Oil paint and canvas, ‘[t]he old materials’, says Collins, ‘are very simple. Your paint, your canvas - it hasn’t begun to be exhausted.’Collins always painted in artificial light but that never diminished the work. Moonrise on the Lake captures a wonderful, quiet energy. The moon’s reflection glows bright, shines bright on a calm, muted lake.In an Irish Times interview, 1973, he told Harriet Cooke: ‘I don’t think it matters a damn. A good play is never better because it is put on in the open air. Plein air, al fresco, it doesn’t matter at all’ adding that ‘[a]rt explains humanity; it’s outside nature. It’s a necessity, an impetus, a force.’When Patrick Collins died, Aidan Dunne rightly recognised him as ‘one of the finest Irish painters of the century and one of the select few to have contributed to an Irish artistic identity’.Niall MacMonagle, February 2020

      Adam's
    • Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994)Lake Swan FeedingOil on board, 35 x 50cm (13¾ x 19½)SignedProvenance: Hendriks Gallery, label verso.Born Dromore West, County Sligo, in 1910, Patrick Collins grew up in Riverstown and, later, in Sligo town but hsold
      Sep. 02, 2020

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994)Lake Swan FeedingOil on board, 35 x 50cm (13¾ x 19½)SignedProvenance: Hendriks Gallery, label verso.Born Dromore West, County Sligo, in 1910, Patrick Collins grew up in Riverstown and, later, in Sligo town but h

      Est: €10,000 - €15,000

      Patrick Collins HRHA (1910-1994)Lake Swan FeedingOil on board, 35 x 50cm (13¾ x 19½)SignedProvenance: Hendriks Gallery, label verso.Born Dromore West, County Sligo, in 1910, Patrick Collins grew up in Riverstown and, later, in Sligo town but his father, an RIC constable, contracted tuberculosis, was unable to work, and died when Collins was twelve. Patrick Collins’s younger sister also died and his mother, widowed when Collins was thirteen, ran a little grocery shop until her health also failed. Collins was sent at fourteen to St Vincent’s Orphanage in Glasnevin and having done well at school worked in an insurance company in Dublin for twenty years. Looking back on those years, Collins told Harriet Cooke, in 1973, that he lived near Stephen’s Green, and ‘every morning I’d walk through it around nine, and every day it was different, and every day the whole thing has a new scene. The birds and trees, when I look at them I read them like a book. When you’re interested in birds, you see bits of difference.’He read widely, attended evening art classes at the National College of Art but was mainly self-taught and, in his mid-thirties, he became a full-time artist. He had his first solo show in 1956. Collins’s west-of-Ireland background not only influenced his subject matter, landscape, lakes, birds, but his sympathy for the marginalised, as seen in a masterpiece such as Travelling Tinkers [1968], can be understood in the light of Collins’s own family challenges and difficulties. But what is most distinctive about Collins’s work is his palette of blues and grey and grey blues and his use of a framing device or border within the work, a window, as it were, into another world. Fionna Barber in Art in Ireland [2013] sees ‘the indication of a frame within a frame’ as a device that amplifies ‘a sense of displacement’ and ‘the perception of another reality within the painting’.For Collins, ‘It is the aura of an object which interests me, more than the object. I see a few bottles on a table and I feel there is more than a few bottles. It is the something more I try to paint.’ So, too, with this swan on a lake. It is both swan and aura and swans in Irish mythology, what Collins called ‘the Celtic thing’, perhaps resonate here. In Lake Swan Feeding the swan is centre, its pure white presence, amid a misty grey, blue, green lake, is recognisable, as is a group of swans, background, top right. The single swan is alone, yes. Is that swan lonely That’s up to the viewer. As Peter Murray observes, ‘Collins preferred to leave the interpretation to the observer, acknowledging that the viewer creates the work of art at the moment of apprehension’. Other bird paintings, Bird against the Window from 1963, for example, could be seen as an image of longing, escape and Collins himself said that his The Rook: Bird in a Tree, captured his lonely years in the orphanage. Not for Collins, Yeats’s nine-and-fifty swan. This feeding swan is on its own but the feeding detail in the title suggests a swan at ease and being nourished. When Patrick Collins died in 1994 his ashes were scattered on the shore of Lough Gill. Ciara Ferguson who was at the ceremony remembered how ‘We gathered at the side of Lough Gill, at the place where he played as a boy, and, as the ashes scattered, the only sound was a lone piper. Tony Cronin gave the oration. Then, suddenly, everyone turned to the sound of a frantic beating of snow-white wings as a single swan took to the air with all the drama and poignancy of, well, the free spirit of Paddy.’In 1958 Collins won a Guggenheim Award for his ‘Liffey Quayside’, won the Irish landscape prize in 1971, was elected HRHA in 1980, a member of Aosdána in 1981 and Saoi in 1987, the first visual artist so honoured. He was conferred with an honorary doctorate by Trinity College in 1988 and his work is in every major Irish collection.Niall MacMonagle, February 2020

      Adam's
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