Figure and Foliage, oil, 1954
London Plane Tree (view from his 3rd Story Studio in Westbourne Terrace?), Patrick Swift (1927-1983), dated [1956-59] on reverse, oil on canvas; 33 by 24cm
Trees at Saint Colombs ( Glebe Gallery), Patrick Swift, oil on canvas, 100 x 75 cms, 1960; Swift holidayed at Saint Colombs and left this painting as a thank you
Girl under tree (Oonagh?), Patrick Swift (1927-83), Oil, c.1954, London/Dublin (poor quality reproduction)
Italian Gardens, Hyde Park, Oil on board (poor quality reproduction)
Patrick Swift, Italian Gardens, Hyde Park, oil on hardboard (poor quality reproduction)
Kitchen still life, Patrick Swift, oil on board, 1950s (poor quality reproduction)
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About Swift
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Patrick Swift and Irish Art
Brian Fallon
...However, after his arrival in London his style changed, not immediately but gradually and very thoroughly. In fact, it was less a stylistic change than a transformation. From being a painter with sharp, angular outlines and a thin paint surface, he became one who 'drew with the brush', modelled in heavy, laden strokes, and, in general, daubed and dragged the paint around until it did his bidding.
Stylistically his 'first period' and 'his second period' could hardly be more different from one another, though the underlying sensibility somehow remains the same... It is dangerous, however, to generalise too much or too widely about Swift's development, since it is so inadequately chartered. He did not date or sign his work, or even give his pictures titles... and though he liked on occasion to write about other artist's work, past and present, he did not discuss his own except in the most general terms... he is a headache to write about in any but the loosest chronological terms.
One motif which he took with him to London was a love of urban views seen from a window - his studio, presumably - of old gardens and backyards, an everyday world somehow peopled with possibilities of human lives and encounters. This world existed very strongly in Dublin at the time, especially behind the tall Georgian or neo-Georgian houses of Baggot Street, Pembroke Road, Waterloo Road, and other quintessential Southside areas. It had a special appeal, or at least a special significance, to the bohemian intelligentsia of McDaid's and other literary pubs, who often lived temporarily in such places and certainly went to parties, discussions or drinking sessions in them. Just as the Soho or Camden Town of Sickert's time remains embedded in his work, so the psychological aura of the 1950s haunts Swift's paintings, as it does Lucian Freud's rather similar views from his various London studios. The milieus of McDaid's and of bohemian Soho, after all, were closely allied, and many people, including Swift, travelled from one to the other...
Swift's portraits of George Barker, Patrick Kavanagh, David Wright and others of his circle include some of his best works, and are among the finest portraits painted in Britain at this period. A deeply cultured man himself, with literary tastes, he was specially qualified to interpret in paint the complex, individualistic people who were his contemporaries or friends. Once again, his approach was basically humanist, not formalist...
Since Expressionism was not at all in favour in England (or Ireland) at this time, it is very relevant to wonder what precisely moved Swift in this direction. Partly, no doubt, his own volition, and in the virtually underground art circles he was moving in there was a certain Expressionist strain, even though it was confined to a few. Bacon, of course, is an obvious case, but Bacon's painting is sui generis, and though Swift admired him greatly, he never worked on Bacon's scale or took the technical risks he did. Bacon might be an inspiring force, but his style was inimitable and afforded no direct model to anybody. Auerbach was another artist whom Swift knew and admired and featured in X magazine when Auerbach was still little known, but his glutinously heavy paint and very individual mentality - half central European, half Londoner - were not attributes Swift could or would have imitated. I believe that the real influence behind his new style was Soutine who was being rediscovered about this time both in England and America. There is no doubt at all that Swift admired him, and in fact Soutine became something of a cult in his circle (I believe personally that Bacon himself felt his influence for a while). He was certainly an influence on Auerbach, as Robert Hughes's book on him brings out…
Underlying both early and middle-period Swift - in fact, most of his output apart from the sun-soaked, serene works of his last years - there is a basic disquiet, a quality which is obvious to the most superficial observer. Fashionable psycho-babble will look straight-away for private sources, not to say neurosis, but what we are dealing with is a metaphysic not a mere psychic knot. From the very first, there is a shadowed, and shadowy, essence in his work, and the figures and objects are often ringed with a kind of penumbral quality, almost a halo in reverse. In a sense this can be read as a kind of modern-equivalent to chiaroscuro, using the word in a deeper sense, not as a mere technical device for making a figure or still-life object stand out more... It should be remembered, however, that he was not only a painter of suburban bohemia, he was also a painter of nature... Both in Ireland and England he painted out of doors…
- Brian Fallon, taken from his essay 'Patrick Swift and Irish Art', 1993, reproduced in Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, 2001, Gandon Editions. First published: 'Patrick Swift and Irish Art', Portfolio 2 - Modern Irish Arts Review, Gandon Editions, Cork, 1993
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The Sunday Tribune
The lost hope of Irish art
Aidan Dunne
...Swift studied at the NCAD in the 1940s and, after a brief spell in Paris, set to work in Dublin with his friend Lucian Freud…
He was always down to earth in his treatment and subject matter, something of a kitchen sink painter even before the term was invented…
He moved to London, a melting pot of cultural and artistic ideas. At home in “the Bohemian jungle of Soho”, he partook of artistic and, always, literary life…
Enormous changes were afoot in the art world, however. Abstraction of one kind or another dominated post war Europe. Then there were the American Abstract Expressionists. Pop art was just around the corner.
Swift saw the kind of art that he made – more, the kind of artistic world within which he dwelled – under threat as never before. He was a representational artist through and through, in the Kokoschka mould. Fidelity to visual experience above all. But he saw the mere survival of this tradition as being under threat…
Yet the record of his own work suggests that he took an unduly alarmist view of contemporary developments. His paintings, for example, often went more than halfway towards abstraction inasmuch as there is a useful distinction to be drawn between abstraction and representation at all.
He had an analytical eye and many paintings are reminiscent not only of Cézanne, whom he greatly admired, but of Mondrian (before he had restricted himself to grids), whom Swift also, suprisingly enough, had a great deal of time for...
- Aidan Dunne, The lost hope of Irish art, The Sunday Tribune, Nov 28, 1993
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By Heart
Elizabeth Smart - A Life
Rosemary Sullivan
Elizabeth's life was very social. She had numerous friends in Soho as well as professional friends. She continued to meet Barker when he came up to London - he was still living with Cass. The editors of X magazine, Patrick Swift and David Wright, would meet at her flat in the beginning of the sixties to do interviews, and Elizabeth sometimes offered her drawing room as a sort of office where they would hammer out their editorials. The artist Craigie Aitchison recalled being interviewed there by Paddy Swift, and Elizabeth wrote their words down, including the bits from the pub where they adjourned afterwards... The painter Frank Auerbach remembered her coming into The French one evening, having made thirty pounds in a couple of hours writing advertising for Jaeger fashions; they went back to the Westbourne Terrace flat, and, though the pipes were frozen, she produced food and drink. He, being penniless in those days and unable to get home, had fallen asleep on a bed and awoke to find a pound note in his pocket. "This happened two or three times. She deemed it a matter of course to make sacrifices for artists," said Auerbach. Over the years there was often somebody in residence, including Robert MacBryde, Mrs Watt's son Sholto Watt, John Deakin, Michael Asquith and his second wife, Hase, or Anthony Cronin and his wife.
- Rosemary Sullivan, By Heart, Elizabeth Smart - A Life, p.274, Flamingo, London, 1992
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Images
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Dublin Oil - Dublin Watercolour/ Ink - Italy - Oakridge/ Ashwell Watercolour - Oakridge/ Ashwell Oil - London Oil - London Watercolour/ Ink - France - Algarve Oil - Algarve Watercolour/ Ink - Self-Portraits - Trees - Portraits I - Portraits II - Porches Pottery - Books - Misc - Algarve Studio
Note: many of the reproductions displayed here are of poor quality
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By Swift
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Nano Reid - Some notes on Caravaggio - Italian Report - The Artist Speaks - X magazine - RHA Exhibition 1951 - Eça de Queiroz & Fernando Pessoa - The Portuguese Enigma - Notebooks - All
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About Swift
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Main
Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal - IMMA 1993 Retrospective Catalogue - Dublin 1950-2 - By His Friends - X magazine - Poems - Further Quotes About - All
By His Friends
Anthony Cronin - John Ryan - John Jordan - C.H.Sisson - Martin Green - John McGahern - David Wright - Lima de Freitas - Katherine Swift - Tim Motion - Lionel Miskin - Jacques D'Arribehaude - Brian Higgins - George Barker - Patrick Kavanagh
Further Quotes
Brian Fallon - Aidan Dunne - Derek Hill - Brendan Behan - Lucian Freud - Patrick Kavanagh - Elizabeth Smart - Further Quotes About
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