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