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Edward McGuire RHA (1932-1986) Pearse Hutchinson Oil on canvas, 132 x 107cm (52 x 42) Signed and dated 1970 Provenance: Collection of John and Harden Jay; Private Collection, Dublin Literature: Brian Fallon and others, Edward McGuire p86, full page illustration, p.87, catalogue raisonne no. 45. Exhibited: Dublin, David Hendrick's Gallery, Claddagh Records' Group Exhibition 1970, cat. no. 24 Irish Exhibition of Living Art 1971, cat. no. 45; Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery The Irish Imagination, 1971, cat. no. 15 (also shown in Washington DC, Philadelphia and Boston) Artist's Choice, Ulster Museum, 1973, cat. no. 6, 6th Festival International, Cagnes-sur-Mer 1974, diploma award; Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, EnVisage: The Face in Contemporary Art, 9th October 2001 - 21st April 2002. This work featured in the 1977 RTE documentary on Edward McGuire. This work was on loan to the Irish Museum of Modern Art from 1993 to October 2008. A superb example of Edward McGuire’s portraiture at its finest, painted at the beginning of a decade in which he completed likenesses of a succession of major Irish literary figures, including Julia O’Faolain, Michael Hartnett, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Cronin, Francis Stuart and Paul Durcan. Born in Glasgow to Irish parents who returned to Ireland and settled in Dublin when he was five years old, Pearse Hutchinson attended Synge St and studied Italian and Spanish at UCD. A friend of John Jordan, he was one of the mid-century Irish literary set and became a fixture in Irish cultural life. But there remained something elusive, even fugitive about him. The word “unconventional” has been used in relation to his talent and fortunes - although he occupied an academic position for a time, he was too restless a spirit to pursue a career as such. That restlessness led to travels and sojourns in Europe, especially Spain, and extended to a linguistic restlessness: he was enamoured of languages and liked to lose himself in the possibilities they opened up. That included his “native” tongue, for he also wrote in Irish, feeling able to express himself more directly in the language. And he was an enthusiastic translator. By the time he painted Hutchinson’s portrait, McGuire was fully mature as an artist. To some extent he had to emerge from his father’s shadow: Edward McGuire senior was a high-profile public figure, a sportsman, senator and businessman (who owned Brown Thomas). His son, surviving the challenges of childhood infirmities, came late to art. Enthused by the painters of the Florentine Renaissance, he eventually developed a meticulous, highly realistic mode of painting, at some remove from the Post-Impressionism his father, who also painted, favoured. McGuire’s studio (its contents now in IMMA) was like a laboratory. Working from precise preparatory drawings he made his highly distinctive paintings there with the aid of an elaborate colour dictionary, many years in the devising. This extraordinary colour recipe book provided him with the formulae for a vast range of tonal colours: rather than shading colour with black or white, he drew on an exactly prescribed mixture of colours, often complementaries, to produce the desired tonality. This painstaking method largely accounts for the exceptionally lustrous, rich quality of his paint surfaces. His painting have all the impact of, especially, Northern Renaissance portraiture, while being thoroughly modern. Aidan Dunne, November 2023