Patrick Swift
Encyclopedia
Patrick Swift was an artist born in Dublin, Ireland
. Patrick Swift was a painter
and key cultural figure in Dublin and London
before moving to the Algarve in southern Portugal
, where he is buried in the town of Porches
. He used the pseudonym James Mahon for some of his writing.
arts review / McDaid's pub
circle of artist
ic and literary figures that included Patrick Kavanagh
, Anthony Cronin
, Brendan Behan
, et al. In London he was an integral member of the Soho
set that included George Barker
, Elizabeth Smart
, et al., and founded and co-edited, with the poet David Wright
, the legendary ‘X’ magazine
which Swift used to champion figurative painters such as Francis Bacon
, Alberto Giacometti
, Lucian Freud
, Frank Auerbach
, Craigie Aitchison
and David Bomberg
(whose posthumous papers he unearthed & edited). In Portugal he continued painting while also writing and illustrating books on Portugal and founding Porches Pottery
, which revived a dying industry.
During his career Swift only held two solo exhibitions: Dublin in 1952 and Lisbon
in 1974. His first exhibition at the Waddington Gallery in 1952 was highly acclaimed. For Swift, however, his art seems to have been a very personal and private matter. David Wright recalled finding him actively hiding his work because he was expecting a millionaire art collector to visit. Distrusting publicity, he avoided exhibitions and his work was rarely shown. By his death in 1983 Swift, save for his intimate friends, had been forgotten by the art world. Most thought that he had long since stopped painting. In 1993 the Irish Museum of Modern Art
(IMMA) held a retrospective of Swift's work. The exhibition received critical acclaim, with fellow artists such as Derek Hill (Irish Times, 24 January 1994) declaring him to be “probably the most formidable Irish artist of this century.”
painter. Though his style changed considerably over the years, his essential personality as an artist never did. He was plainly not interested in the formalist aspects of Modernism. He wanted art to have an expressive, emotive, even psychological content, though not in any literary sense. Anthony Cronin
, who was close to Swift for many years, says that for Swift “painting was a re-creation of what the painter saw: in his own case at least not what the painter had seen or could imagine, but what he was actually looking at during the act of painting. A faithfulness of the sort was part of the bargain, part of his contract with his art… [which] had nothing to do with description…What was at stake was a faithful recreation of the truth to the artist of the experience, in the painter’s case the visual experience, the artist being admittedly only one witness, one accomplice during and after the fact. Of course this faithfulness did not rule out expressionist overtones. The truth was doubtless subjective as well as objective. Swift's blues and greys were usually properties of what he was painting. They were also part of his vision of things, properties of his mind. We felt then that time could only find its full expression through an art that was frugal, ascetic, puritanical even...In faraway Paris, Samuel Beckett felt the same thing, writing the trilogy that was to give asceticism, frugality, puritanisim and the bitter humour that lies at the heart of the joke that is life, their full expression. Swift's avoidance of warm colours... was born in that time and afterwards harked back to it...“
Although he commented on art and was intimate with many leading artists of his day, Swift never affiliated with any official or quasi-official art group or ‘style’. John Ryan
(founder of the arts magazine Envoy
) in his introduction to Swift for the Rosc catalogue, 1971, which included Swift's portrait of Kavanagh: "'He painted the trees and gardens he cherished and the people he loved; because he was, happily, not unduly concerned, a style that came naturally to him shortly became his own distinctive 'style' - his signature - as uniquely his own as the subject content. Swift's peculiar style reminds us of nobody but the artist - a telling point with a painter who has set no store on this aspect of the job. In Swift we have, then, a man with an observation that is both curious and affectionate - for his attention to details in his subject is paternal and not academic."
He had three distinct ‘periods’: Dublin, London, and Algarve. His early work in Dublin, where he used a thin paint surface, has a tense, spare, more-real-than-real quality. In London he became more expressive in his use of paint, applying thick layers of paint, using the brush more and ‘modelling’ the paint surface. In the Algarve he continues this trend into a heavy, broken impasto and some of his later work verges on becoming abstract.
His work comprises portrait
s, ‘tree portraits’, rural landscape
s and urban landscapes. He worked in a variety of media including oils
, watercolour, ink
, charcoal, lithography
and ceramics. It is one of the peculiarities of his methods of working that he seems to have done few, if any, preliminary drawings or studies - works that could be classified as 'studies' are generally complete in themselves and need no reworking into another medium. John Ryan: "I remember him setting up an enormous canvas in the garden of Hatch Street...and, without any further ado, painting a portrait of a girl without any preliminary sketches or without squaring off the canvas, without any preliminary work whatever. Yet the finished product looked well thought out, as if it were the result of mature judgement."
Trees held a special fascination for Swift, particularly the patterns created by their branches, with Swift treating these shapes and patterns in an almost abstract manner. John McGahern
(Swift drew his portrait in London, 1960) noted that he was fond of the line "those particular trees/ that caught you in their mysteries". His later work is almost entirely composed of ‘tree portraits’ and rural landscapes. It is for his 'intensity of observation' (Theo Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists) that Patrick Swift is perhaps best known. He created compositions of incredible intricacy. Like the neo-romantics before him, nature itself inspired Swift, who effortlessly, it seems, translates into paint the organic and seemingly random twisting vegetative forms.
Swift regarded painting as “a deeply personal and private activity". As the Irish Times noted in 1952, his work is “intensely personal and strangely disturbing.” When writing about art or painting he would frequently refer to what he termed "its mysteries": "...the most important factor, the element of mystery...". This element of "mystery" is clearly evident in his own work, which always seems to have an underlying energy, some unknown quantity; "Its life depends on the degree to which it is inhabited by mystery, speaks to us of the unknown". Swift called his painting "making marks", "a way of passing the time", and, with regard to the nature of his work, wrote: "My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in."
, a Christian Brothers School in Dublin. Although a self-taught artist he did attend night classes at the National College of Art
in 1946 & 48(under Sean Keating
), freelanced in London in the late 1940s and briefly attended the Grande Chaumière
in the summer of 1950. In the late 1940s he had a studio on Baggot Street and from 1950-52 Swift set up his studio on Hatch Street. During this period he shared his board with his then girlfiend, the American poet Claire McAllister, Anthony Cronin (Swift painted his portrait in 1950), John S. Beckett
(cousin to Samuel), and briefly with Patrick Pye
(Swift painted his portrait in 1952). Lucian Freud was a frequent visitor to Dublin -his visits coinciding with the courtship of Lady Caroline Blackwood- and would share Swift’s studio - Anthony Cronin recalled finding the two artists in the studio. He first exhibited in group shows at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1950 & 51 where his work was singled out by critics. The Dublin Magazine
commented on Swift’s “uncompromising clarity of vision which eschews the accidental or the obvious or the sentimental...[and] shows his power to convey the full impact of the object, as though the spectator were experiencing it for the first time”. In 1952 he held his first solo exhibition at the Waddington Galleries. Time magazine
in an article on the exhibition: "Irish critics got a look at the work of a touseled young (25) man named Paddy Swift and tossed their caps in the air. Paddy's 30 canvases are as grey and gloomy as Dublin itself—harshly realistic paintings of dead birds and rabbits, frightened-looking girls and twisted potted plants. Their fascination is in the merciless, sharply etched details, as oppressive and inquiring as a back-room third degree. Dublin Understands. Wrote Critic Tony Gray in the Irish Times
: Swift 'unearths [from his subjects] not a story, nor a decorative pattern, nor even a mood, but some sort of tension which is a property of their existence.' Said the Irish Press
: 'An almost embarrassing candor... Here is a painter who seems to have gone back to the older tradition and to have given the most searching consideration to the composition of his painting.' Dublin, which likes authors who write with a shillelagh, understood an artist who painted with one. The Word Is Tension. By 1950, Paddy was in Paris... Nights, he went to the galleries, and there he found what he wanted to do. He liked such old French masters as the 17th century's Nicolas Poussin, the 19th century's Eugène Delacroix, such moderns as Switzerland's Alberto Giacometti and Britain's Francis Bacon. The much-admired decorative style of the Matisses is not for Paddy Swift. 'Art,' he thinks, 'is obviously capable of expressing something more closely related to life than these elegant designs.' His main idea is to suggest the tensions he finds in life. 'I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it. This tension—tension is the only word for it—can be painted.' This may have been Swift's only ever interview. A motif of his work at this time was his bird imagery, which appear to have symbolic overtones, and may have even been a subtle form of self-portraiture. He contributed essays on art and artists he admired (e.g.Nano Reid
, who painted Swift's portrait in 1950) to Irish arts magazines Envoy
and The Bell
. Swift formed part of the group of artists and writers that were involved with Envoy
(the Envoy offices were located at 39 Grafton Street and most of the journal’s business was conducted in the nearby pub, McDaid’s) that included Kavanagh (at least three portraits), Cronin (at least two portraits), Behan (Swift & Cronin later stopped speaking to Behan due, in their view, to Behan’s ill treatment of Kavanagh-see postcard from Behan to J.Ryan), Brian O'Nolan(Swift illustrated Heinrich Böll's
German translation of The Hard Life
), Pearse Hutchinson
(they had been at Synge Street CBS together), John Jordan
(Synge Street CBS; two portraits), et al. During these years he also got to know Samuel Beckett
(Beckett had an extract from "Watt" appear in Envoy; folowing his mother's funeral Beckett spent the afternoon with Swift in McDaid's, later to be joined by the rowdy Kavanagh & O'Nolan; possibly one portrait; Beckett was later to contribute to Swift's X Magazine with the first appearance of his "L'Image"), Edward McGuire
(Swift encouraged McGuire to paint), and Daniel Farson
(photos by Farson from this period include Freud, Swift and Behan on Leeson St.). Following the Waddington exhibition Swift moved to London in November 1952, using it as his base, with occasional trips to Dublin and stays in France
, Italy
, Oakridge
and the Digswell Arts Trust
.
). Here he painted and wrote essays on art. Following his year in Italy Swift returned to Dublin (via Paris and London), for Christmas 1955, where Oonagh wanted to be for the birth of their fist child, Katherine Swift
. Swift then returned to London in 1956 and accepted Elizabeth Smart's
offer to share Winstone Cottage (then owned by John Rothenstein
), which contained a studio, in Oakridge, Gloucestershire
. Peggy Guggenheim
, whom he had befriended in Venice
, visited the Swifts in Oakridge. From October 1958 to 1959 Swift spent time at Digswell Arts Trust
, then located at Digswell House, a decayed Regency mansion with cottages and outbuildings on the edge of Welwyn Garden City
. Swift came to Digswell through the visionary educator Henry Morris
. The first artists arrived in 1957, and Swift took up residency a year later, sharing a studio with Michael Andrews
. During his residency at Digswell, Swift painted many views of Ashwell
and its Springs, one of which was presented by Henry Morris to Melbourn Village College
at its opening in 1959, but Swift had already left, leaving Lady Moutbatten
, who was the chief guest at the opening, to remarked as she received the painting that its creator was at that moment in a taxi heading for London.
In London his work grew more expressive. Brian Fallon
(chief arts critic to The Irish Times
for 35 years) in his essay "Patrick Swift And Irish Art": "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 lines 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 ‘second period’ could hardly be more different from one another, though the underlying sensibility somehow remains.":
During this period Swift painted portraits of the poets George Barker
, Patrick Kavanagh
, David Wright
, Brian Higgins
, John Heath-Stubbs
, Paul Potts, C. H. Sisson
and David Gascoyne
(there may be others). At the time Swift was sometimes referred to as the 'poets' painter'- many of his close friends were poets and they seem to have regarded him as 'their' painter. Wanda Ryan Smolin (art historian and writer) writing in the Irish Arts Review, 1994, says one thing that distinguishes Swift is "his ability to communicate certain truths on what one senses to be a deeply spiritual level. It is perhaps this quality in his work which links Swift with the world of poetry and poets. Apart from close family members, poets were almost exclusively subjects of his portraits; the series of poet portraits shown at IMMA [1993 Retrospective] are quite exceptional by any standards and must place him among the very best Irish painters of the twentieth century." Aidan Dunne
(arts critic to the Irish Times) says "Swift was an outstanding portrait painter"; while Fallon states that these London portraits "are among the finest portraits painted in Britain at this period...Yet they were seen by only a handful of people, and in some cases were even lucky to have survived." Fallon also notes that the Kavanagh and Wright portraits are close to Expressionism
. On Swift's London tree paintings, Aidan Dunne says: "many paintings zoom in on their motif itself delighting in the hectic rhythms established by the orderly but profuse curvilinear sweep of the branches. Even earlier studies of back gardens reveal him to be drawn to the abstract qualities of the tangled stems and foliage." While in London he associated with many leading artists of the day, such as Francis Bacon (there was work by Bacon, which he had given Swift, found in Swift’s Algarve studio; as there was work by Freud found among his London studio contents), with the flat at 9 Westbourne Terrace becoming a "mini-soho". Christopher Barker (son of George Barker and Elizabeth Smart, who lived upstairs from the Swifts and wrote French cookbooks with Swifts' wife) writing about this period (The Observer
, 2006): "On many occasions through the early Sixties, writers and painters such as David Gascoyne, Paddy Kavanagh, Roberts MacBryde
and Colquhoun
and Paddy Swift would gather at Westbourne Terrace in Paddington
, our family home at that time. They came for editorial discussions about their poetry magazine, X." In 1962 Swift left London for an extended trip to southern Europe.
. He designed the building that houses Porches Pottey (which the Portuguese government once listed) to resemble a 17C farmhouse, and several other buildings: he restored and designed a 17C building that today is the 'O Leao de Porches' restaurant, building the famous chimney himself; the Rouxinol restaurant in Monchique; the original building and entrance to the International School of the Algarve, which Swift was instrumental in founding; his house on the cliffs outside Carvoeiro; numerous buildings in Algarve display hand-crafted ornamental plasterwork by Swift, akin to pargeting or relief in cement, generally depicting birds, animals and foliage. Though Swift had voluntarily removed himself from the art world (he had effectively done so, at least as an exhibiting painter involved with the art establishment, following his 1952 solo exhibition) he did make new artistic friendships in the Algarve, such as Norah McGuinness
, Jacques d'Arribehaude (see French Wikipedia), and Lima de Freitas
, and he exhibited: drawings for Algarve, A Portrait And A Guide in the Diário de Notícias Gallery (Portuguese national newspaper), Lisbon, 1965; an exhibition of his pottery in Galeria Diarios de Noticias, Lisbon, 1970; and an exhibition of his paintings in Galeria S Mamede, Lisbon, 1974. He designed the sets for The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Portuguese National Theatre Company, Lisbon, 1977. Swift lived and worked in the Algarve from 1962 until his premature death, from an inoperable brain tumour, in 1983. His work from this period includes portraits of his friend, the Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco de Sá Carneiro, who commissioned Swift to paint his portrait when he was elected in 1980, and his partner, Snu Abecassis, both of whom died in a plane crash in 1980. Swift is buried in the Igreja Matriz
church in Porches, for which he designed the stations of the cross.
On Swift’s later work
Richard Morphet, Keeper, Tate Britain
from 1986 until 1998 (in his introduction to the Swift exhibition at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery
in Cork
): "Although highly acclaimed in critical and artistic circles, the work of the Irish painter Patrick Swift has rarely been publicly exhibited...The vogue at the end of the 50s for abstract painting was not to his taste, nor could he work with academic realism. He sought an expression of life and human creativity which was meaningful and accessible, yet intensely personal, and inspired by emotion, by landscape. It seemed Ireland and England restricted him. Swift emigrated to Portugal in 1962...These are some of his most resonant works, where he has found his voice, and in the invigorating new climate the change in his painting was towards an enhanced sensuous warmth, a sense of the integrity of light and a feeling of the integration with nature, of painter and viewer." Brian Fallon: “In a way he almost anticipated the rawness of 1980’s New Expressionism". There is a remarkable series of late watercolours (until very recently, unknown to all except a few people) which Brian Fallon
says are a high point in watercolour painting: "Almost all are of landscape subjects, or at least outdoor ones. Trees shimmer in the fierce white light, houses or cottages huddle into their fields or gardens, there is an abundant feeling of fertility and also of serenity. Figures are rare, though the human presence is implicit throughout. They have a faint flavour of Cézanne’s late watercolours, but they are bigger and also less formalised, looser and more lyrical. Taken as a sequence they represent one of the peaks of watercolour painting over the last forty years; certainly no Irish painter has done better." Fernando De Azvedo (painter and President of Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon): "From his early days in Dublin to the end of his life in the Algarve, we can see the very particular and unrivalled persistence of the authentic and inimitable painter in his vision and creative decisions, one which must be seen in its true dimensions- in the unusual path that swift trod- and be clarified by history."
", Envoy
, March 1950; "The Artist Speaks", Envoy, Feb 1951) and The Bell
('Painting – The RHA Exhibition’, June 1951). In the 1952 Time magazine
article on Swift it mentions that during his time in Paris in the summer of 1950 he admired "such moderns as Switzerland's Alberto Giacometti and Britain's Francis Bacon". He had met Giacometti in Paris, and possibly Bacon too, though its more likely Swift knew Bacon from his previous visits to London. Giacometti was beginning to build a reputation but the mention of Bacon, says the critic Brian Fallon, "is quite remarkable. He had, in the early fifties, a mere coterie reputation, and was generally regarded as an isolated and rather fringe figure… Very few were prepared to concede that he was a modern master." Swift's essay ‘Some notes on Caravaggio’, written during his stay in Italy in 1954/5, appeared in Nimbus
(London) in 1956. He was also known for persuading art collectors to buy Bacon and Freud.
X magazine: In London he founded and edited - with the poet David Wright - "the brilliant but short-live quarterly X
" ( Cambridge paperback guide to literature in English), A Quarterly Review of Literature and the Arts, for which Swift wrote articles on art under the pseudonym 'James Mahon' (Swift's mother was a Mahon from Co. Wicklow).
David Wright in his introduction to An Anthology from X: "...The true begetter and leading light of X was Patrick Swift... Swift was, of course, responsible for the art side of the magazine. These were the boom years of abstract art. Swift, twenty years ahead of his time, launched a series of penetrating attacks on the cult… as well as promoting the work of then unknown or unfashionable figurative painters, among them the young Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and Craigie Aitchison, and such as-yet uncannonized painters as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and the forgotten David Bomberg. Examples of their work were reproduced; more importantly, it was Swift's idea that the artist should speak for themselves, which was achieved either by transcribing their tape-recorded conversation... or by publishing their notes. Swifts’s unearthing and editing of David Bomberg’s outspoken and apocalyptic pensées, scattered about his miscellaneous papers, was an outstanding contribution." "To say nothing of the continentals like Kokoschka
, Giacometti
, André Masson
... Nor was he any less active on the literary side of the magazine. Here Swift and I worked in perfect harmony". In an interview with Poetry Nation
: "I received a letter from the Irish painter Patrick Swift inviting me to come in with him to edit a new quarterly... We were out to provide a platform for the individual vision, not accepted avant-gardisme or second-hand attitudes.". Wright regarding Swift promoting his own work: "Swift and Cronin... brought me to the attention of the publisher Derek Verschoyle- and this was typical of Swift, who would take immense pains to push the product of anybody whose work he believed in, yet never bothered to promote his own."
Michael Schmidt
(The Guardian
, 2006): " David Wright's and Patrick Swift's legendary X set the common agenda for a generation of European painters, writers and dramatists." Philip Toynbee
(The Observer
, 1959):"X is a magazine dedicated to genius, passion and intelligence. It has the ease and authority of all excellent creations."
Martin Green
: "It was he, together with Tony Cronin, who initially put up the idea of bringing together Kavanagh's poems for the Collected Poems… Paddy Swift had a catalytic enthusiasm that ignited a response elsewhere. I remember being introduced by him to John McGahern… which I recommended for publication but was overruled, and, on being asked by him who he should turn to, told him to go to Faber & Faber... It was he who brought to my attention the Charles Sisson version of Catullus, which I subsequently published… It was he who helped to find a publisher for Brian Higgins..." John McGahern: "I wrote a first novel with a pretentious title, The End or Beginning of Love... They liked it and published an extract. That was my first time in print. The magazine was influential, though, like most magazines of the kind, it was short lived. Many painters, like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, wrote for the magazine. I met these people when the magazine invited me to London... The extract in X attracted interest from a number of publishers. Fabers, among other publishers, wrote to me. T. S. Eliot was working at the firm then." In his essay, 'The Bird Swift', McGahern noted Swift saying, as they walked around the Mayfair Galleries in the summer of 1960, that he admired LS Lowry: "Sometimes we would wander through the commercial galleries around Bond Street. He was particularly excited by a small show of Giacometti's sculptures, and he admired LS Lowry
. He said then that anybody with enough money to buy a Lowry would make a fortune."
Patrick Kavanagh: Swift believed in Kavanagh's genius and promoted him. John Ryan
says: "Swift, in fact, made a decided impact on Kavanagh. It is hard to believe now that it was mainly a cultural impact and that he actually changed the older man`s entire approach to poetry." Swift was responsible for Kavanagh appearing in Nimbus
in 1956, as David Wright who was then editor says: "These poems [19 of Kavanagh's poems were published] had been posted to me by Swift, whose brother James had invaded the poet's flat in Dublin, gathered up the trampled manuscripts scattered about the floor, and had them sorted, typed, and bound. One of the carbon copies was sent to me." Antoinette Quinn, however, in her biography of Patrick Kavanagh, says that the idea of Jimmy Swift invading the poet's flat is a myth. Quinn states that Kavanagh had a typescript rejected by Macmillan's and that subsequently Swift, on one of his trips to Dublin, "was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published. He had to returned to London… but persuaded Kavanagh to entrust the precious typescript to his brother, Jimmy, to have three copies professionally typed up...[Jimmy,] acting under his brothers instructions... sent one copy each to David Wright and Martin Green
in London." Wright's version of events is, no doubt, the story put out by Swift himself, and one which would not have displeased Kavanagh. Antoinette Quinn goes on to say that "Publication there [In Nimbus] was to prove a turning point… The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was to be directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus, and his Collected Poems (1964)..." And Martin Green, who put together the first collection of Kavanagh's poems for MacGibbon and Kee, acknowledges: "it was following the suggestion of the painter Patrick Swift and the poet Anthony Cronin that the publication came about." Regarding their friendship, Antoinette Quinn says: "Swift believed in his genius and indulged him and... the older man... came to lean on Swift as a beloved nephew." Kavanagh would often stay with Swift and his family at Westbourne Terrace.
Brian Fallon: “[X was] a remarkable publication which, in some respects, was light years ahead of its time... Swift's criticism is that of the practicing artist not that of a practicing critic, and when speaking of his criticism I do not merely mean only his occasional critical essays, but his activity as co-editor of a magazine and as champion of Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Craigie Aitchison, Nano Reid, Giacometti and David Bomberg (whose posthumous papers he edited).
This is criticism in the valid, active , propagandistic sense, not merely the daily or weekly grind of reviewing all sorts and conditions of artists, good and bad, but mostly mediocre. Once again much of Swift's activity in this field was semi-underground, almost subversive, often done in the teeth of the modernist establishment of his day. His record in this field speaks for itself... I cannot think of any other Irish painter who achieved anything like what he did as a critic and editor and discoverer of talent, and very few painters in any other country either. Wyndham Lewis
, it is true, was a verbose propagandist, but on the whole he was a bad critic, and somehow his propaganda almost always turns out to be some form of self-aggrandisement, whereas Swift almost always pushed the fortunes and reputations of his friends and almost never his own. Yet, you do not get, from his general stance, that his motives were simply friendship and good intentions. There is a tone of dedication throughout, as though he was serving art, and not merely artists... It is a peculiarity of his very individual psyche
and personality that Swift cannot be ‘placed’ purely as a painter. He was an artist in the broad sense before he was specifically a painter, and his context embraces literature and other disciplines besides painting or drawing (It is noticeable that he had more friends who were literary men than friends who were painters). Swift is not a painter’s painter, he is an artist’s artist, a man whose mentality overlapped into other fields besides his own chosen one.”
says, "this is the typical Irish artist-intellectual of the post-war years, reared on Joyce and Baudelaire, introspective, cerebral, at once cynical and idealistic, at odds with much or most of what the society around him believed in or affected to believe in", and Aidan Dunne
that Swift was a man "who seems always to have wanted nothing more than to be allowed to be himself."
If Swift was a private man he was certainly not a reclusive type. His hospitality and generosity were legendary. The house he built in the Algarve, where he would entertain most nights, was covered in his paintings. It is tempting to say Swift had some sort of an attachment to his work, yet he did, on occasion, sell, and give his work away, to people he knew; and he often simply left work behind: Hardy Bronstein, a friend, for years faithfully minded much of Swift's London work; following his break-up with Claire McAllister, he offered her a choice of the remaining pictures; he left work with a friend and with his mother in Dublin. As his temperamental tendency was also only to paint those whom he knew well, perhaps it is simply as John Ryan says: "he painted the trees and gardens he cherished and the people he loved". Swift took his responsibility to his family seriously and was not totally averse to engaging in other activities if the occasion demanded, viewing it as a temporary necessity. As Cronin says, "he was a painter... Anything else was a temporary necessity or inconvenience, boring perhaps, or, in some lights, amusing", and as Swift wrote in his notebook: "(I) do not accept that the artist should not engage in other activities though when he does he must accept a different responsibility." Apart from his Pottery, X magazine, books and building design in the Algarve, he taught ceramics in London and briefly worked as a lettings agent in the Algarve. Anthony Cronin believes that in painting the Algarve trees, “in the contemplation and re-creation of these woody, self-supporting stems and trunks with their abundant leafage he found a happiness which was not dependent on human response or the satisfactions of ambition.” Swift, according to those closest to him, was happy just to be painting. Cronin has also noted that Swift was enamoured with a certain idea of success: "Paddy‘s attitude to success, so pure and ascetic from one aspect, but also so in love with a certain idea of it. In a way he does not need to be a success, he has always been one." Swift was certainly aware of the validity of what he was doing. And it must be remembered that Swift's life was unexpectedly cut short, when he was at the peak of his powers. It may be that he had internally decided on a return to the marketplace (e.g. "All this puts me back in a situation I have purposely avoided for twenty years. But I have made the mental decision (or should that be spiritual choice) to put out my work again."- Swift in a letter to Patrick Mehigan), and to exhibiting- it has been said that he had expressed a desire for setting up a studio in Wicklow, Ireland, and showing his work there. His last -unfinished- painting is a portrait set in the Wicklow mountains of his maternal grandparents holding a baby.
started gathering information for a book to commemorate Swift's life. Ryan, who had been suffering from ill health for many years, passed away in 1992 before he could complete his commemorative book. Veronica Jane O’Mara completed the book and 'Ps…of course' (the title of which Swift's widow was reportedly against) was published in 1993 to coincide with the IMMA retrospective exhibition, when his work was brought to Dublin. The 1993 IMMA Retrospective was acclaimed by critics and artists alike.
Brian Fallon, writing in the The Irish Times: "Certainly, from now onwards, no one can write Patrick Swift out of Irish art history." Today, however, Swift is still largely overlooked. In 2002 the Department of Foreign Affairs (who also awarded Swift the grant to study in Italy) sponsored the 'Patrick Swift: An Irish Artist In Portugal' exhibitions that were held at the Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork, and Palacio Foz in Lisbon. In 2004 Swift's work appeared on the BBC Antiques Roadshow where the BBC art critic, Stephen Somerville, was highly praising of his work, saying simply of a London tree painting, "I love it". The work shown on the ARS (a painting of Eccleston Square as seen from his studio and botanical studies of fungi painted in Ashwell) was unknown and illustrates how uncharted much of Swift’s career still is. The father of the lady who brought Swift's work to the ARS seems to have been a sort of patron of Swift’s. In 2005 the Office of Public Works, Dublin, held an exhibition of paintings, drawings and watercolours by Swift. His portrait of Patrick Kavanagh (a portrait that should be on public display) forms part of the CIÉ
(Irish state transport authority) collection and recently toured as part of the ‘CIE: Art On The Move’ exhibitions to much acclaim. Two pictures by Swift, from IMMA's permanent collection, 'Forget-me-[K]nots on a Cane Table' & London Self-Portrait, were exhibited in 'The Moderns' exhibition, IMMA, October 2010- Feb 2011. Swift's work is still rarely to be seen. It would be hoped that one day there will be an exhibition of his work in England.
Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape. Picturemaking is ludicrous in the light of the awful times we must endure. It is sufficient to contemplate the nature of composition to see that the picture itself is impossible. Each square inch of Titian contains the whole pointless- between the cradle and the grave. My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.
To paint even a bottle is dramatic. A leaf will do.
To know what it is to look at things, life as a prayer, a mass, a celebration.
One who opens his eyes and sees. To be good at seeing. How difficult not to see anything but the visible. And nothing will be left but dust and manure. Attempting the impossible. Approach the mystery.
Metaphysics- what metaphysics do those trees have?
What trace of the creature subsists in the work. It is a way of staying alone, passing the time subjected to the object - silent, still. Walk with humility in the landscape. To be some natural thing - an ancient tree - no thinking - not to think is central to the activity.
There is the modern phenomenon of the artist declaring all is void, nothing is possible, and soon is making his fortune out of despair and emptiness. I am too romantic to accept the dishonesty inherent in such a role, or perhaps it is my religious education. Such a position cannot be a religious position. (I) do not accept that the artist should not engage in other activities though when he does he must accept a different responsibility.
Life is more important than art- quantity is only important in that the amount of activity is greater not the number of works.
Obey God by living spontaneously.
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
. Patrick Swift was a painter
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
and key cultural figure in Dublin and London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
before moving to the Algarve in southern Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
, where he is buried in the town of Porches
Porches (Lagoa)
Porches is a civil parish/freguesia in the municipality/concelho of Lagoa in Portugal, about 10 km east of the city of Lagoa. It is 15.57 km² in area, with 1,901 inhabitants ; its population density is 122.1 persons/km²...
. He used the pseudonym James Mahon for some of his writing.
Overview
In Dublin he was part of the EnvoyEnvoy, A Review of Literature and Art
December 1949- July 1951. Dublin, Ireland. Editor & Founder: John RyanDuring its brief existence, Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art, published the work of a broad range of writers, Irish and others. The first to publish J. P...
arts review / McDaid's pub
Public house
A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller...
circle of artist
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
ic and literary figures that included Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet and novelist. Regarded as one of the foremost poets of the 20th century, his best known works include the novel Tarry Flynn and the poems Raglan Road and The Great Hunger...
, Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin is an Irish poet. He received the Marten Toonder Award for his contribution to Irish literature....
, Brendan Behan
Brendan Behan
Brendan Francis Behan was an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English. He was also an Irish republican and a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army.-Early life:...
, et al. In London he was an integral member of the Soho
Soho
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable...
set that included George Barker
George Barker (poet)
George Granville Barker was an English poet and author.-Life and work:Barker was born in Loughton, near Epping Forest in Essex, England, elder brother of Kit Barker [painter] George Barker was raised by his Irish mother and English father in Battersea, London. He was educated at an L.C.C. school...
, Elizabeth Smart
Elizabeth Smart (author)
Elizabeth Smart was a Canadian poet and novelist. Her book, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, detailed her romance with the poet George Barker...
, et al., and founded and co-edited, with the poet David Wright
David Wright (poet)
David John Murray Wright was an author and "an acclaimed South African-born poet".-Biography:Wright was born in Johannesburg, South Africa 23 February 1920 of normal hearing....
, the legendary ‘X’ magazine
X (magazine)
X, A Quarterly Review was a British arts review published in London which ran for seven issues between 1959-1962. It was founded and co-edited by Patrick Swift and David Wright...
which Swift used to champion figurative painters such as Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon (painter)
Francis Bacon , was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, austere, graphic and emotionally raw imagery. Bacon's painterly but abstract figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds...
, Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...
, Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH was a British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impasted portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time...
, Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach
Frank Helmut Auerbach is a painter born in Germany although he has been a naturalised British citizen since 1947.-Biography:Auerbach was born in Berlin, the son of Max Auerbach, a patent lawyer, and Charlotte Nora Burchardt, who had trained as an artist...
, Craigie Aitchison
Craigie Aitchison (painter)
Craigie Aitchison, RA, CBE was a Scottish painter. He was known for his many paintings of the Crucifixion, one of which hangs behind the altar in the chapter house of Liverpool Cathedral.-Education:...
and David Bomberg
David Bomberg
David Garshen Bomberg was an English painter, and one of the Whitechapel Boys.Bomberg was one of the most audacious of the exceptional generation of artists who studied at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks, and which included Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, C.R.W. Nevinson and Dora Carrington...
(whose posthumous papers he unearthed & edited). In Portugal he continued painting while also writing and illustrating books on Portugal and founding Porches Pottery
Porches Pottery (Olaria Algarve)
Porches Pottery is a producer of hand-painted pottery in the town of Porches, in the Algarve region of Portugal. The pottery was founded in 1968 by artists Patrick Swift and Lima de Freitas, in order to revive a traditional Algarve pottery industry that was rapidly dying out in favour of more...
, which revived a dying industry.
During his career Swift only held two solo exhibitions: Dublin in 1952 and Lisbon
Lisbon
Lisbon is the capital city and largest city of Portugal with a population of 545,245 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Lisbon extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of 3 million on an area of , making it the 9th most populous urban...
in 1974. His first exhibition at the Waddington Gallery in 1952 was highly acclaimed. For Swift, however, his art seems to have been a very personal and private matter. David Wright recalled finding him actively hiding his work because he was expecting a millionaire art collector to visit. Distrusting publicity, he avoided exhibitions and his work was rarely shown. By his death in 1983 Swift, save for his intimate friends, had been forgotten by the art world. Most thought that he had long since stopped painting. In 1993 the Irish Museum of Modern Art
Irish Museum of Modern Art
The Irish Museum of Modern Art also known as IMMA, is Ireland's leading national institution exhibiting and collecting modern and contemporary art. The museum opened in May 1991 and is located in Royal Hospital Kilmainham, a 17th-century building near Heuston Station to the west of Dublin's city...
(IMMA) held a retrospective of Swift's work. The exhibition received critical acclaim, with fellow artists such as Derek Hill (Irish Times, 24 January 1994) declaring him to be “probably the most formidable Irish artist of this century.”
Work
He was a figurativeFigurative art
Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.-Definition:...
painter. Though his style changed considerably over the years, his essential personality as an artist never did. He was plainly not interested in the formalist aspects of Modernism. He wanted art to have an expressive, emotive, even psychological content, though not in any literary sense. Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin is an Irish poet. He received the Marten Toonder Award for his contribution to Irish literature....
, who was close to Swift for many years, says that for Swift “painting was a re-creation of what the painter saw: in his own case at least not what the painter had seen or could imagine, but what he was actually looking at during the act of painting. A faithfulness of the sort was part of the bargain, part of his contract with his art… [which] had nothing to do with description…What was at stake was a faithful recreation of the truth to the artist of the experience, in the painter’s case the visual experience, the artist being admittedly only one witness, one accomplice during and after the fact. Of course this faithfulness did not rule out expressionist overtones. The truth was doubtless subjective as well as objective. Swift's blues and greys were usually properties of what he was painting. They were also part of his vision of things, properties of his mind. We felt then that time could only find its full expression through an art that was frugal, ascetic, puritanical even...In faraway Paris, Samuel Beckett felt the same thing, writing the trilogy that was to give asceticism, frugality, puritanisim and the bitter humour that lies at the heart of the joke that is life, their full expression. Swift's avoidance of warm colours... was born in that time and afterwards harked back to it...“
Although he commented on art and was intimate with many leading artists of his day, Swift never affiliated with any official or quasi-official art group or ‘style’. John Ryan
John Ryan (Dublin artist)
John Ryan Dublin, Ireland was an Artist, broadcaster, publisher, critic, editor, patron and publican.John Ryan was many things but primarily a key figure in Bohemian Dublin for many years. He knew nearly every artist of note that lived in, or passed through, Dublin from the 1940s onwards...
(founder of the arts magazine Envoy
Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art
December 1949- July 1951. Dublin, Ireland. Editor & Founder: John RyanDuring its brief existence, Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art, published the work of a broad range of writers, Irish and others. The first to publish J. P...
) in his introduction to Swift for the Rosc catalogue, 1971, which included Swift's portrait of Kavanagh: "'He painted the trees and gardens he cherished and the people he loved; because he was, happily, not unduly concerned, a style that came naturally to him shortly became his own distinctive 'style' - his signature - as uniquely his own as the subject content. Swift's peculiar style reminds us of nobody but the artist - a telling point with a painter who has set no store on this aspect of the job. In Swift we have, then, a man with an observation that is both curious and affectionate - for his attention to details in his subject is paternal and not academic."
He had three distinct ‘periods’: Dublin, London, and Algarve. His early work in Dublin, where he used a thin paint surface, has a tense, spare, more-real-than-real quality. In London he became more expressive in his use of paint, applying thick layers of paint, using the brush more and ‘modelling’ the paint surface. In the Algarve he continues this trend into a heavy, broken impasto and some of his later work verges on becoming abstract.
His work comprises portrait
Portrait
thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...
s, ‘tree portraits’, rural landscape
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...
s and urban landscapes. He worked in a variety of media including oils
Oil painting
Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...
, watercolour, ink
Pen
A pen is a device used to apply ink to a surface, usually paper, for writing or drawing. Historically, reed pens, quill pens, and dip pens were used, with a nib of some sort to be dipped in the ink. Ruling pens allow precise adjustment of line width, and still find a few specialized uses, but...
, charcoal, lithography
Lithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
and ceramics. It is one of the peculiarities of his methods of working that he seems to have done few, if any, preliminary drawings or studies - works that could be classified as 'studies' are generally complete in themselves and need no reworking into another medium. John Ryan: "I remember him setting up an enormous canvas in the garden of Hatch Street...and, without any further ado, painting a portrait of a girl without any preliminary sketches or without squaring off the canvas, without any preliminary work whatever. Yet the finished product looked well thought out, as if it were the result of mature judgement."
Trees held a special fascination for Swift, particularly the patterns created by their branches, with Swift treating these shapes and patterns in an almost abstract manner. John McGahern
John McGahern
John McGahern was one of the most important Irish authors of the latter half of the twentieth century. Before his death in 2006 he was hailed as "the greatest living Irish novelist" by The Observer.-Life:...
(Swift drew his portrait in London, 1960) noted that he was fond of the line "those particular trees/ that caught you in their mysteries". His later work is almost entirely composed of ‘tree portraits’ and rural landscapes. It is for his 'intensity of observation' (Theo Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists) that Patrick Swift is perhaps best known. He created compositions of incredible intricacy. Like the neo-romantics before him, nature itself inspired Swift, who effortlessly, it seems, translates into paint the organic and seemingly random twisting vegetative forms.
Swift regarded painting as “a deeply personal and private activity". As the Irish Times noted in 1952, his work is “intensely personal and strangely disturbing.” When writing about art or painting he would frequently refer to what he termed "its mysteries": "...the most important factor, the element of mystery...". This element of "mystery" is clearly evident in his own work, which always seems to have an underlying energy, some unknown quantity; "Its life depends on the degree to which it is inhabited by mystery, speaks to us of the unknown". Swift called his painting "making marks", "a way of passing the time", and, with regard to the nature of his work, wrote: "My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in."
Dublin
He was educated at Synge Street CBSSynge Street CBS
Synge Street CBS is a Christian Brothers School in Dublin 8, Ireland. It was founded in 1864.-Primary school:The primary section caters for boys from seven to twelve years. It is called Sancta Maria CBS. It opened in 1954.-Secondary school:...
, a Christian Brothers School in Dublin. Although a self-taught artist he did attend night classes at the National College of Art
National College of Art and Design
The National College of Art and Design is a national art and design school in Dublin, Ireland.-History:Situated on Thomas Street, the NCAD started as a private drawing school and has become a national institution educating over 1,500 day and evening students as artists, designers and art educators...
in 1946 & 48(under Sean Keating
Seán Keating
Seán Keating was an Irish romantic-realist painter who painted some iconic images of the Irish War of Independence and of the early industrialization of Ireland...
), freelanced in London in the late 1940s and briefly attended the Grande Chaumière
Académie de la Grande Chaumière
The Académie de la Grande Chaumière is an art school in the VIe arrondissement of Paris, France. The school was founded in 1902 by the Swiss Martha Stettler , who refused to teach the strict academic rules of painting of the École des Beaux-Arts. It opened the way to the "Art Indépendant"...
in the summer of 1950. In the late 1940s he had a studio on Baggot Street and from 1950-52 Swift set up his studio on Hatch Street. During this period he shared his board with his then girlfiend, the American poet Claire McAllister, Anthony Cronin (Swift painted his portrait in 1950), John S. Beckett
John S. Beckett
John Stewart Beckett , was an Irish musician, composer and conductor; cousin of the famous writer and playwright Samuel Beckett.-Youth and education:...
(cousin to Samuel), and briefly with Patrick Pye
Patrick Pye
Patrick Pye is a sculptor, painter and stained glass artist, resident in County Dublin.Major commissions can be seen all over Ireland. In 1999 a retrospective of his work was exhibited by the Royal Hibernian Academy. He is a founding member of Aosdána. -External links:**...
(Swift painted his portrait in 1952). Lucian Freud was a frequent visitor to Dublin -his visits coinciding with the courtship of Lady Caroline Blackwood- and would share Swift’s studio - Anthony Cronin recalled finding the two artists in the studio. He first exhibited in group shows at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1950 & 51 where his work was singled out by critics. The Dublin Magazine
The Dublin Magazine
The Dublin Magazine was an Irish literary journal founded and edited by the poet Seamus O'Sullivan and published in Dublin by New Square Publications....
commented on Swift’s “uncompromising clarity of vision which eschews the accidental or the obvious or the sentimental...[and] shows his power to convey the full impact of the object, as though the spectator were experiencing it for the first time”. In 1952 he held his first solo exhibition at the Waddington Galleries. Time magazine
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
in an article on the exhibition: "Irish critics got a look at the work of a touseled young (25) man named Paddy Swift and tossed their caps in the air. Paddy's 30 canvases are as grey and gloomy as Dublin itself—harshly realistic paintings of dead birds and rabbits, frightened-looking girls and twisted potted plants. Their fascination is in the merciless, sharply etched details, as oppressive and inquiring as a back-room third degree. Dublin Understands. Wrote Critic Tony Gray in the Irish Times
The Irish Times
The Irish Times is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Kevin O'Sullivan who succeeded Geraldine Kennedy in 2011; the deputy editor is Paul O'Neill. The Irish Times is considered to be Ireland's newspaper of record, and is published every day except Sundays...
: Swift 'unearths [from his subjects] not a story, nor a decorative pattern, nor even a mood, but some sort of tension which is a property of their existence.' Said the Irish Press
The Irish Press
The Irish Press was an Irish national daily newspaper published by Irish Press plc between 5 September 1931 and 25 May 1995.-Foundation:...
: 'An almost embarrassing candor... Here is a painter who seems to have gone back to the older tradition and to have given the most searching consideration to the composition of his painting.' Dublin, which likes authors who write with a shillelagh, understood an artist who painted with one. The Word Is Tension. By 1950, Paddy was in Paris... Nights, he went to the galleries, and there he found what he wanted to do. He liked such old French masters as the 17th century's Nicolas Poussin, the 19th century's Eugène Delacroix, such moderns as Switzerland's Alberto Giacometti and Britain's Francis Bacon. The much-admired decorative style of the Matisses is not for Paddy Swift. 'Art,' he thinks, 'is obviously capable of expressing something more closely related to life than these elegant designs.' His main idea is to suggest the tensions he finds in life. 'I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it. This tension—tension is the only word for it—can be painted.' This may have been Swift's only ever interview. A motif of his work at this time was his bird imagery, which appear to have symbolic overtones, and may have even been a subtle form of self-portraiture. He contributed essays on art and artists he admired (e.g.Nano Reid
Nano Reid
Nano Reid was an Irish painter. - Biography :The Irish landscape artist, figure painter and portraitist Nano Reid was born in Drogheda, County Louth in 1905. In 1920, she won a scholarship to study fine art painting and drawing at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art - now the National College of...
, who painted Swift's portrait in 1950) to Irish arts magazines Envoy
Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art
December 1949- July 1951. Dublin, Ireland. Editor & Founder: John RyanDuring its brief existence, Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art, published the work of a broad range of writers, Irish and others. The first to publish J. P...
and The Bell
The Bell (magazine)
The Bell Magazine Dublin, Ireland. A monthly magazine of literature and social comment which had a seminal influence on a generation of Irish intellectuals.- History :...
. Swift formed part of the group of artists and writers that were involved with Envoy
Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art
December 1949- July 1951. Dublin, Ireland. Editor & Founder: John RyanDuring its brief existence, Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art, published the work of a broad range of writers, Irish and others. The first to publish J. P...
(the Envoy offices were located at 39 Grafton Street and most of the journal’s business was conducted in the nearby pub, McDaid’s) that included Kavanagh (at least three portraits), Cronin (at least two portraits), Behan (Swift & Cronin later stopped speaking to Behan due, in their view, to Behan’s ill treatment of Kavanagh-see postcard from Behan to J.Ryan), Brian O'Nolan(Swift illustrated Heinrich Böll's
Heinrich Böll
Heinrich Theodor Böll was one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers. Böll was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.- Biography :...
German translation of The Hard Life
The Hard Life
The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor is a comic novel by Flann O'Brien . Published in 1961, it was O'Brien's fourth novel and the third to be published....
), Pearse Hutchinson
Pearse Hutchinson
Pearse Hutchinson is an Irish poet, broadcaster and translator.-Childhood and education:Pearse Hutchinson was born in Glasgow. His father, Harry Hutchinson, a Scottish printer whose own father had left Dublin to find work in Scotland, was Sinn Féin treasurer in Glasgow and was interned in Frongoch...
(they had been at Synge Street CBS together), John Jordan
John Jordan (poet)
John Jordan was an Irish poet born in Dublin on 8 April 1930. He was educated at Synge Street CBS, University College, Dublin and Pembroke College, Oxford. In his teens he acted on the stage of the Gate Theatre, Dublin, before winning a Scholarship in English and French to Oxford University from...
(Synge Street CBS; two portraits), et al. During these years he also got to know Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
(Beckett had an extract from "Watt" appear in Envoy; folowing his mother's funeral Beckett spent the afternoon with Swift in McDaid's, later to be joined by the rowdy Kavanagh & O'Nolan; possibly one portrait; Beckett was later to contribute to Swift's X Magazine with the first appearance of his "L'Image"), Edward McGuire
Edward McGuire (painter)
Edward McGuire was an Irish painter.- Biography :The Irish portraitist, still-life artist and bird painter Edward McGuire was born in Dublin. He studied painting, drawing and the history of art at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome, and at the Slade School of Fine Art, London...
(Swift encouraged McGuire to paint), and Daniel Farson
Daniel Farson
Daniel Negley Farson a British writer and broadcaster, was a popular television personality and prominent public figure in the late 1950s and early 1960s.-Early life:...
(photos by Farson from this period include Freud, Swift and Behan on Leeson St.). Following the Waddington exhibition Swift moved to London in November 1952, using it as his base, with occasional trips to Dublin and stays in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, Oakridge
Oakridge, Gloucestershire
Oakridge is a village in Gloucestershire, England. The parish church is St. Bartholomew's Church. It is just on the outskirts of Stroud, Gloucestershire....
and the Digswell Arts Trust
Digswell Arts Trust
Digswell Arts Trust was the brainchild of Henry Morris, a pioneering educationalist. Through his enthusiasm, dedication and influence he persuaded the Government and the Welwyn Garden City Development Corporation to establish a Trust for professional artists in Welwyn Garden City, England.It was...
.
Italy, Oakridge & Digswell Arts Trust
In 1954 Swift was awarded a grant by the Irish Cultural Relations Committee to study in Italy. He was accompanied by his future wife, Oonagh Ryan (Image sister of the artist John Ryan and the Irish actress Kathleen RyanKathleen Ryan
Kathleen Ryan was an Irish actress.She was born in Dublin, Ireland of Tipperary parentage and was a spirited and heart warming Irish actress who appeared in British and Hollywood movies between 1947 and 1957.-Family:...
). Here he painted and wrote essays on art. Following his year in Italy Swift returned to Dublin (via Paris and London), for Christmas 1955, where Oonagh wanted to be for the birth of their fist child, Katherine Swift
Katherine Swift (artist)
Katherine Swift was a painter, illustrator and ceramicist.- Biography :Family: Katherine was the first child of Patrick Swift and Oonagh Ryan. Her uncle was the artist John Ryan; Her aunt the film actress Kathleen Ryan. Born Dublin: Katherine was born in Dublin in 1956...
. Swift then returned to London in 1956 and accepted Elizabeth Smart's
Elizabeth Smart (author)
Elizabeth Smart was a Canadian poet and novelist. Her book, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, detailed her romance with the poet George Barker...
offer to share Winstone Cottage (then owned by John Rothenstein
John Rothenstein
Sir John Knewstub Maurice Rothenstein CBE was an English art historian. He grew up in London the son of Sir William Rothenstein. The family was loosely connected to the Bloomsbury Set. John Rothenstein studied at Oxford University and became friends with T. E. Lawrence...
), which contained a studio, in Oakridge, Gloucestershire
Oakridge, Gloucestershire
Oakridge is a village in Gloucestershire, England. The parish church is St. Bartholomew's Church. It is just on the outskirts of Stroud, Gloucestershire....
. Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim
Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim was an American art collector. Born to a wealthy New York City family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went down with the Titanic in 1912 and the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, who would establish the Solomon R...
, whom he had befriended in Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
, visited the Swifts in Oakridge. From October 1958 to 1959 Swift spent time at Digswell Arts Trust
Digswell Arts Trust
Digswell Arts Trust was the brainchild of Henry Morris, a pioneering educationalist. Through his enthusiasm, dedication and influence he persuaded the Government and the Welwyn Garden City Development Corporation to establish a Trust for professional artists in Welwyn Garden City, England.It was...
, then located at Digswell House, a decayed Regency mansion with cottages and outbuildings on the edge of Welwyn Garden City
Welwyn Garden City
-Economy:Ever since its inception as garden city, Welwyn Garden City has attracted a strong commercial base with several designated employment areas. Among the companies trading in the town are:*Air Link Systems*Baxter*British Lead Mills*Carl Zeiss...
. Swift came to Digswell through the visionary educator Henry Morris
Henry Morris (education)
Henry Morris is known primarily as the founder of Village Colleges. He was the Chief Education Officer for Cambridgeshire for over thirty years, taking up the post in 1922 during a time of depression in the United Kingdom following the First World War.-Early life:Morris was born in Southport in...
. The first artists arrived in 1957, and Swift took up residency a year later, sharing a studio with Michael Andrews
Michael Andrews (artist)
Michael Andrews was a British painter.-Life and work:Michael Andrews was born in Norwich, England, the second child of Thomas Victor Andrews and his wife Gertrude Emma Green. He completed his two years' National service between 1947 and 1949, nineteen months of which was spent in Egypt...
. During his residency at Digswell, Swift painted many views of Ashwell
Ashwell, Hertfordshire
Ashwell is a village and civil parish situated about four miles north of Baldock in Hertfordshire.It has a wealth of architecture spanning several centuries. The dates almost entirely from the 14th century and is renowned for its ornate church tower which stands at , and is crowned by an...
and its Springs, one of which was presented by Henry Morris to Melbourn Village College
Melbourn Village College
Melbourn Village College is an Academy, located in Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, England that serves an extensive area of South Cambridgeshire. The school has over 500 students aged 11-16.-Village College:...
at its opening in 1959, but Swift had already left, leaving Lady Moutbatten
Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma
Edwina Cynthia Annette Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma,, GBE, DCVO, CI, DStJ was an English heiress, socialite, relief-worker, wife of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and last Vicereine of India.- Lineage and wealth :Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma...
, who was the chief guest at the opening, to remarked as she received the painting that its creator was at that moment in a taxi heading for London.
London
Swift was already familiar with London and its literary and artistic circles by the early 1950s: he had freelanced in London in the late 1940s; in the early fifties he would occasionally stay with Freud in London; in 1953 he shared a flat with Anthony Cronin in Camden but actually used it as his studio, staying instead with Oonagh Ryan in Hampstead - it was at this point that Swift and Wright first discussed the idea of creating a new literary magazine, a quarterly which would publish writing on artistic issues they felt to be of importance; 1957-58 he had a flat and studio at 39 Eccleston Square; From 1959-62 he lived at 9 Westbourne Terrace where he stayed with his young family, and it was during this period that he founded X magazine.In London his work grew more expressive. Brian Fallon
Brian Fallon (critic)
Brian Fallon is one of Ireland's foremost art critics. He was born in 1933 at Cootehill, County Cavan, the second son of the poet Padraic Fallon, and was educated at St Peter’s College, Wexford, and Trinity College, Dublin. He was Chief Critic of The Irish Times for 35 years and its Literary...
(chief arts critic to The Irish Times
The Irish Times
The Irish Times is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper launched on 29 March 1859. The editor is Kevin O'Sullivan who succeeded Geraldine Kennedy in 2011; the deputy editor is Paul O'Neill. The Irish Times is considered to be Ireland's newspaper of record, and is published every day except Sundays...
for 35 years) in his essay "Patrick Swift And Irish Art": "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 lines 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 ‘second period’ could hardly be more different from one another, though the underlying sensibility somehow remains.":
During this period Swift painted portraits of the poets George Barker
George Barker (poet)
George Granville Barker was an English poet and author.-Life and work:Barker was born in Loughton, near Epping Forest in Essex, England, elder brother of Kit Barker [painter] George Barker was raised by his Irish mother and English father in Battersea, London. He was educated at an L.C.C. school...
, Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet and novelist. Regarded as one of the foremost poets of the 20th century, his best known works include the novel Tarry Flynn and the poems Raglan Road and The Great Hunger...
, David Wright
David Wright (poet)
David John Murray Wright was an author and "an acclaimed South African-born poet".-Biography:Wright was born in Johannesburg, South Africa 23 February 1920 of normal hearing....
, Brian Higgins
Brian Higgins (poet)
Brian Higgins Poet, mathematician and professional rugby player.‘Born at Batley in 1930, bored at Bradford in 1940, in 1950 he had an affair with the gamma function. He was educated in 1960 at the "York Minster", Soho.’...
, John Heath-Stubbs
John Heath-Stubbs
John Francis Alexander Heath-Stubbs OBE was an English poet and translator, known for his verse influenced by classical myths, and the long Arthurian poem Artorius .- Biography :...
, Paul Potts, C. H. Sisson
C. H. Sisson
Charles Hubert Sisson CH was a British writer, best known as a poet and translator.-Life:...
and David Gascoyne
David Gascoyne
David Gascoyne was an English poet associated with the Surrealist movement.-Early life and Surrealism:...
(there may be others). At the time Swift was sometimes referred to as the 'poets' painter'- many of his close friends were poets and they seem to have regarded him as 'their' painter. Wanda Ryan Smolin (art historian and writer) writing in the Irish Arts Review, 1994, says one thing that distinguishes Swift is "his ability to communicate certain truths on what one senses to be a deeply spiritual level. It is perhaps this quality in his work which links Swift with the world of poetry and poets. Apart from close family members, poets were almost exclusively subjects of his portraits; the series of poet portraits shown at IMMA [1993 Retrospective] are quite exceptional by any standards and must place him among the very best Irish painters of the twentieth century." Aidan Dunne
Aidan Dunne
A graduate of the National College of Art and Design, Aidan Dunne was art critic of In Dublin magazine, Sunday Press and the Sunday Tribune. Currently visual arts critic of The Irish Times, Dunne has written extensively on Irish art, with essays on Michael Mulcahy, Patrick Scott, Hughie O'Donoghue,...
(arts critic to the Irish Times) says "Swift was an outstanding portrait painter"; while Fallon states that these London portraits "are among the finest portraits painted in Britain at this period...Yet they were seen by only a handful of people, and in some cases were even lucky to have survived." Fallon also notes that the Kavanagh and Wright portraits are close to Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
. On Swift's London tree paintings, Aidan Dunne says: "many paintings zoom in on their motif itself delighting in the hectic rhythms established by the orderly but profuse curvilinear sweep of the branches. Even earlier studies of back gardens reveal him to be drawn to the abstract qualities of the tangled stems and foliage." While in London he associated with many leading artists of the day, such as Francis Bacon (there was work by Bacon, which he had given Swift, found in Swift’s Algarve studio; as there was work by Freud found among his London studio contents), with the flat at 9 Westbourne Terrace becoming a "mini-soho". Christopher Barker (son of George Barker and Elizabeth Smart, who lived upstairs from the Swifts and wrote French cookbooks with Swifts' wife) writing about this period (The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
, 2006): "On many occasions through the early Sixties, writers and painters such as David Gascoyne, Paddy Kavanagh, Roberts MacBryde
Robert MacBryde
Robert MacBryde was a Scottish still-life and figure painter and a theatre set designer.MacBryde was born in Maybole and worked in a factory for 5 years after leaving school. He studied art at Glasgow School of Art from 1932 to 1937...
and Colquhoun
Robert Colquhoun
Robert Colquhoun was a Scottish painter, printmaker and theatre set designer.Colquhoun was born in Kilmarnock and was educated at Kilmarnock Academy...
and Paddy Swift would gather at Westbourne Terrace in Paddington
Paddington
Paddington is a district within the City of Westminster, in central London, England. Formerly a metropolitan borough, it was integrated with Westminster and Greater London in 1965...
, our family home at that time. They came for editorial discussions about their poetry magazine, X." In 1962 Swift left London for an extended trip to southern Europe.
Algarve
Swift’s travels led him to the small fishing village, as it was then, of Carvoeiro in the Algarve. He was so enchanted with the place that he remained. Here he painted, wrote and illustrated books (A Portrait And A Guide to: Algarve; Minho; Lisbon; Birds of Southern Portugal) and founded Porches Pottery (Olaria Algarve)Porches Pottery (Olaria Algarve)
Porches Pottery is a producer of hand-painted pottery in the town of Porches, in the Algarve region of Portugal. The pottery was founded in 1968 by artists Patrick Swift and Lima de Freitas, in order to revive a traditional Algarve pottery industry that was rapidly dying out in favour of more...
. He designed the building that houses Porches Pottey (which the Portuguese government once listed) to resemble a 17C farmhouse, and several other buildings: he restored and designed a 17C building that today is the 'O Leao de Porches' restaurant, building the famous chimney himself; the Rouxinol restaurant in Monchique; the original building and entrance to the International School of the Algarve, which Swift was instrumental in founding; his house on the cliffs outside Carvoeiro; numerous buildings in Algarve display hand-crafted ornamental plasterwork by Swift, akin to pargeting or relief in cement, generally depicting birds, animals and foliage. Though Swift had voluntarily removed himself from the art world (he had effectively done so, at least as an exhibiting painter involved with the art establishment, following his 1952 solo exhibition) he did make new artistic friendships in the Algarve, such as Norah McGuinness
Norah McGuinness
Norah McGuinness was an Irish painter and illustrator.Norah McGuinness trained at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and at Chelsea Polytechnic in London before spending the 1920s working in Dublin as a book illustrator and stage designer...
, Jacques d'Arribehaude (see French Wikipedia), and Lima de Freitas
Lima de Freitas
Lima de Freitas was a Portuguese painter, illustrator, ceramicist and writer. He studied at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes de Lisboa....
, and he exhibited: drawings for Algarve, A Portrait And A Guide in the Diário de Notícias Gallery (Portuguese national newspaper), Lisbon, 1965; an exhibition of his pottery in Galeria Diarios de Noticias, Lisbon, 1970; and an exhibition of his paintings in Galeria S Mamede, Lisbon, 1974. He designed the sets for The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Portuguese National Theatre Company, Lisbon, 1977. Swift lived and worked in the Algarve from 1962 until his premature death, from an inoperable brain tumour, in 1983. His work from this period includes portraits of his friend, the Portuguese Prime Minister Francisco de Sá Carneiro, who commissioned Swift to paint his portrait when he was elected in 1980, and his partner, Snu Abecassis, both of whom died in a plane crash in 1980. Swift is buried in the Igreja Matriz
Igreja Matriz (Porches)
The Igreja Matriz , is situated in the freguesia of Porches, in the concelho of Lagoa in Portugal.Founded in the 16th century, today the church has few vestiages of its early roots...
church in Porches, for which he designed the stations of the cross.
On Swift’s later work
Richard Morphet, Keeper, Tate Britain
Tate Britain
Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...
from 1986 until 1998 (in his introduction to the Swift exhibition at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery
Crawford Municipal Art Gallery
The Crawford Municipal Art Gallery is a public art gallery in the city of Cork, Ireland.Since 1979 the Gallery has been located in the centre of Cork in what used to be the Cork Customs House, built in 1724...
in Cork
Cork (city)
Cork is the second largest city in the Republic of Ireland and the island of Ireland's third most populous city. It is the principal city and administrative centre of County Cork and the largest city in the province of Munster. Cork has a population of 119,418, while the addition of the suburban...
): "Although highly acclaimed in critical and artistic circles, the work of the Irish painter Patrick Swift has rarely been publicly exhibited...The vogue at the end of the 50s for abstract painting was not to his taste, nor could he work with academic realism. He sought an expression of life and human creativity which was meaningful and accessible, yet intensely personal, and inspired by emotion, by landscape. It seemed Ireland and England restricted him. Swift emigrated to Portugal in 1962...These are some of his most resonant works, where he has found his voice, and in the invigorating new climate the change in his painting was towards an enhanced sensuous warmth, a sense of the integrity of light and a feeling of the integration with nature, of painter and viewer." Brian Fallon: “In a way he almost anticipated the rawness of 1980’s New Expressionism". There is a remarkable series of late watercolours (until very recently, unknown to all except a few people) which Brian Fallon
Brian Fallon (critic)
Brian Fallon is one of Ireland's foremost art critics. He was born in 1933 at Cootehill, County Cavan, the second son of the poet Padraic Fallon, and was educated at St Peter’s College, Wexford, and Trinity College, Dublin. He was Chief Critic of The Irish Times for 35 years and its Literary...
says are a high point in watercolour painting: "Almost all are of landscape subjects, or at least outdoor ones. Trees shimmer in the fierce white light, houses or cottages huddle into their fields or gardens, there is an abundant feeling of fertility and also of serenity. Figures are rare, though the human presence is implicit throughout. They have a faint flavour of Cézanne’s late watercolours, but they are bigger and also less formalised, looser and more lyrical. Taken as a sequence they represent one of the peaks of watercolour painting over the last forty years; certainly no Irish painter has done better." Fernando De Azvedo (painter and President of Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon): "From his early days in Dublin to the end of his life in the Algarve, we can see the very particular and unrivalled persistence of the authentic and inimitable painter in his vision and creative decisions, one which must be seen in its true dimensions- in the unusual path that swift trod- and be clarified by history."
Swift the Critic and ‘X’ Magazine
In Dublin he wrote articles for literary and arts magazines such as Envoy ("Nano ReidNano Reid
Nano Reid was an Irish painter. - Biography :The Irish landscape artist, figure painter and portraitist Nano Reid was born in Drogheda, County Louth in 1905. In 1920, she won a scholarship to study fine art painting and drawing at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art - now the National College of...
", Envoy
Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art
December 1949- July 1951. Dublin, Ireland. Editor & Founder: John RyanDuring its brief existence, Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art, published the work of a broad range of writers, Irish and others. The first to publish J. P...
, March 1950; "The Artist Speaks", Envoy, Feb 1951) and The Bell
The Bell (magazine)
The Bell Magazine Dublin, Ireland. A monthly magazine of literature and social comment which had a seminal influence on a generation of Irish intellectuals.- History :...
('Painting – The RHA Exhibition’, June 1951). In the 1952 Time magazine
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
article on Swift it mentions that during his time in Paris in the summer of 1950 he admired "such moderns as Switzerland's Alberto Giacometti and Britain's Francis Bacon". He had met Giacometti in Paris, and possibly Bacon too, though its more likely Swift knew Bacon from his previous visits to London. Giacometti was beginning to build a reputation but the mention of Bacon, says the critic Brian Fallon, "is quite remarkable. He had, in the early fifties, a mere coterie reputation, and was generally regarded as an isolated and rather fringe figure… Very few were prepared to concede that he was a modern master." Swift's essay ‘Some notes on Caravaggio’, written during his stay in Italy in 1954/5, appeared in Nimbus
Nimbus (literary magazine)
Nimbus, "A Magazine of Literature, the Arts, and New Ideas", was a literary magazine co-founded in London in 1951 by Martin Green and Tristram Hull.- History :...
(London) in 1956. He was also known for persuading art collectors to buy Bacon and Freud.
X magazine: In London he founded and edited - with the poet David Wright - "the brilliant but short-live quarterly X
X (magazine)
X, A Quarterly Review was a British arts review published in London which ran for seven issues between 1959-1962. It was founded and co-edited by Patrick Swift and David Wright...
" ( Cambridge paperback guide to literature in English), A Quarterly Review of Literature and the Arts, for which Swift wrote articles on art under the pseudonym 'James Mahon' (Swift's mother was a Mahon from Co. Wicklow).
David Wright in his introduction to An Anthology from X: "...The true begetter and leading light of X was Patrick Swift... Swift was, of course, responsible for the art side of the magazine. These were the boom years of abstract art. Swift, twenty years ahead of his time, launched a series of penetrating attacks on the cult… as well as promoting the work of then unknown or unfashionable figurative painters, among them the young Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and Craigie Aitchison, and such as-yet uncannonized painters as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and the forgotten David Bomberg. Examples of their work were reproduced; more importantly, it was Swift's idea that the artist should speak for themselves, which was achieved either by transcribing their tape-recorded conversation... or by publishing their notes. Swifts’s unearthing and editing of David Bomberg’s outspoken and apocalyptic pensées, scattered about his miscellaneous papers, was an outstanding contribution." "To say nothing of the continentals like Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka
Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes.-Biography:...
, Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.Alberto Giacometti was born in the canton Graubünden's southerly alpine valley Val Bregaglia and came from an artistic background; his father, Giovanni, was a well-known post-Impressionist painter...
, André Masson
André Masson
André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.-Biography:Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, Oise, but was brought up in Belgium. He began his study of art at the age of eleven in Brussels, at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of Constant Montald, and later he studied in Paris...
... Nor was he any less active on the literary side of the magazine. Here Swift and I worked in perfect harmony". In an interview with Poetry Nation
P. N. Review
Launched as Poetry Nation, a twice-yearly hardback, in 1973, PN Review - now an A4 paperback - began quarterly publication in 1976 and has appeared six times a year since 1981...
: "I received a letter from the Irish painter Patrick Swift inviting me to come in with him to edit a new quarterly... We were out to provide a platform for the individual vision, not accepted avant-gardisme or second-hand attitudes.". Wright regarding Swift promoting his own work: "Swift and Cronin... brought me to the attention of the publisher Derek Verschoyle- and this was typical of Swift, who would take immense pains to push the product of anybody whose work he believed in, yet never bothered to promote his own."
Michael Schmidt
Michael Schmidt (poet)
Michael Schmidt is a Mexican-British poet, author and scholar. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is currently Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University, where he is convener of the Creative Writing M.Litt programme...
(The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, 2006): " David Wright's and Patrick Swift's legendary X set the common agenda for a generation of European painters, writers and dramatists." Philip Toynbee
Philip Toynbee
Theodore Philip Toynbee was a British writer and communist. He wrote experimental novels, and distinctive verse novels, one of which was an epic called Pantaloon, a work in several volumes, only some of which are published...
(The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
, 1959):"X is a magazine dedicated to genius, passion and intelligence. It has the ease and authority of all excellent creations."
Martin Green
Martin Green (author)
Martin Green is an English-born writer, editor and publisher.-Background:Born in Stockport, England, Green was schooled at A. S. Neill's Summerhill, while his parents fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.Preston, Paul Doves of war: four women of Spain. Harper Collins,...
: "It was he, together with Tony Cronin, who initially put up the idea of bringing together Kavanagh's poems for the Collected Poems… Paddy Swift had a catalytic enthusiasm that ignited a response elsewhere. I remember being introduced by him to John McGahern… which I recommended for publication but was overruled, and, on being asked by him who he should turn to, told him to go to Faber & Faber... It was he who brought to my attention the Charles Sisson version of Catullus, which I subsequently published… It was he who helped to find a publisher for Brian Higgins..." John McGahern: "I wrote a first novel with a pretentious title, The End or Beginning of Love... They liked it and published an extract. That was my first time in print. The magazine was influential, though, like most magazines of the kind, it was short lived. Many painters, like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, wrote for the magazine. I met these people when the magazine invited me to London... The extract in X attracted interest from a number of publishers. Fabers, among other publishers, wrote to me. T. S. Eliot was working at the firm then." In his essay, 'The Bird Swift', McGahern noted Swift saying, as they walked around the Mayfair Galleries in the summer of 1960, that he admired LS Lowry: "Sometimes we would wander through the commercial galleries around Bond Street. He was particularly excited by a small show of Giacometti's sculptures, and he admired LS Lowry
L. S. Lowry
Laurence Stephen Lowry was an English artist born in Barrett Street, Stretford, Lancashire. Many of his drawings and paintings depict nearby Salford and surrounding areas, including Pendlebury, where he lived and worked for over 40 years at 117 Station Road , opposite St...
. He said then that anybody with enough money to buy a Lowry would make a fortune."
Patrick Kavanagh: Swift believed in Kavanagh's genius and promoted him. John Ryan
John Ryan (Dublin artist)
John Ryan Dublin, Ireland was an Artist, broadcaster, publisher, critic, editor, patron and publican.John Ryan was many things but primarily a key figure in Bohemian Dublin for many years. He knew nearly every artist of note that lived in, or passed through, Dublin from the 1940s onwards...
says: "Swift, in fact, made a decided impact on Kavanagh. It is hard to believe now that it was mainly a cultural impact and that he actually changed the older man`s entire approach to poetry." Swift was responsible for Kavanagh appearing in Nimbus
Nimbus (literary magazine)
Nimbus, "A Magazine of Literature, the Arts, and New Ideas", was a literary magazine co-founded in London in 1951 by Martin Green and Tristram Hull.- History :...
in 1956, as David Wright who was then editor says: "These poems [19 of Kavanagh's poems were published] had been posted to me by Swift, whose brother James had invaded the poet's flat in Dublin, gathered up the trampled manuscripts scattered about the floor, and had them sorted, typed, and bound. One of the carbon copies was sent to me." Antoinette Quinn, however, in her biography of Patrick Kavanagh, says that the idea of Jimmy Swift invading the poet's flat is a myth. Quinn states that Kavanagh had a typescript rejected by Macmillan's and that subsequently Swift, on one of his trips to Dublin, "was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published. He had to returned to London… but persuaded Kavanagh to entrust the precious typescript to his brother, Jimmy, to have three copies professionally typed up...[Jimmy,] acting under his brothers instructions... sent one copy each to David Wright and Martin Green
Martin Green (author)
Martin Green is an English-born writer, editor and publisher.-Background:Born in Stockport, England, Green was schooled at A. S. Neill's Summerhill, while his parents fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.Preston, Paul Doves of war: four women of Spain. Harper Collins,...
in London." Wright's version of events is, no doubt, the story put out by Swift himself, and one which would not have displeased Kavanagh. Antoinette Quinn goes on to say that "Publication there [In Nimbus] was to prove a turning point… The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was to be directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus, and his Collected Poems (1964)..." And Martin Green, who put together the first collection of Kavanagh's poems for MacGibbon and Kee, acknowledges: "it was following the suggestion of the painter Patrick Swift and the poet Anthony Cronin that the publication came about." Regarding their friendship, Antoinette Quinn says: "Swift believed in his genius and indulged him and... the older man... came to lean on Swift as a beloved nephew." Kavanagh would often stay with Swift and his family at Westbourne Terrace.
Brian Fallon: “[X was] a remarkable publication which, in some respects, was light years ahead of its time... Swift's criticism is that of the practicing artist not that of a practicing critic, and when speaking of his criticism I do not merely mean only his occasional critical essays, but his activity as co-editor of a magazine and as champion of Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Craigie Aitchison, Nano Reid, Giacometti and David Bomberg (whose posthumous papers he edited).
This is criticism in the valid, active , propagandistic sense, not merely the daily or weekly grind of reviewing all sorts and conditions of artists, good and bad, but mostly mediocre. Once again much of Swift's activity in this field was semi-underground, almost subversive, often done in the teeth of the modernist establishment of his day. His record in this field speaks for itself... I cannot think of any other Irish painter who achieved anything like what he did as a critic and editor and discoverer of talent, and very few painters in any other country either. Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
, it is true, was a verbose propagandist, but on the whole he was a bad critic, and somehow his propaganda almost always turns out to be some form of self-aggrandisement, whereas Swift almost always pushed the fortunes and reputations of his friends and almost never his own. Yet, you do not get, from his general stance, that his motives were simply friendship and good intentions. There is a tone of dedication throughout, as though he was serving art, and not merely artists... It is a peculiarity of his very individual psyche
Psyche (psychology)
The word psyche has a long history of use in psychology and philosophy, dating back to ancient times, and has been one of the fundamental concepts for understanding human nature from a scientific point of view. The English word soul is sometimes used synonymously, especially in older...
and personality that Swift cannot be ‘placed’ purely as a painter. He was an artist in the broad sense before he was specifically a painter, and his context embraces literature and other disciplines besides painting or drawing (It is noticeable that he had more friends who were literary men than friends who were painters). Swift is not a painter’s painter, he is an artist’s artist, a man whose mentality overlapped into other fields besides his own chosen one.”
A reluctance to exhibit
After his first solo exhibition Swift showed no desire in exhibiting again until 1974, when he was persuaded to hold an exhibition in Lisbon - the venue being the deciding factor for Swift. David Wright has suggested that perhaps some trauma was suffered at his first showing, and it has been noted that much of Swift's early work has an underlying tone of disquiet. Lima de Freitas says that Swift was "hostile to easy success" and opportunism. We know he distrusted publicity and celebrity, which he disliked and considered a distraction, and the success of his first exhibition would have attracted unwanted attention. These were common traits among his Dublin coterie. Aside from his few statement made during the Dublin exhibition it seems he never spoke about his art, not even with those whom he was intimate with, which may add weight to Wright's suggestion of some trauma having been suffered. His statements about art are in his general essays on art and thoughts he would jot down in his notebooks, which rarely refer to his own art. Yet Swift was himself fascinated by artists who wrote: the diaries and letters of Delacroix, the letters of van Gogh and Cézanne, the confessions of Kokoschka, all influenced his thoughts about painting, reinforcing an insistence on complete honesty as the only path to truth. For Swift the only preparation necessary was a moral one. The Canadian critic CJ Fox called Swift a "rebel all-rounder", and he seems to have been naturally anti-establishment, a high-minded idealist, and something of a romantic at heart, with a very definite idea of what being an artist meant- for him at least. Whatever the reasons, Swift’s art seems to have been a very personal and private matter carried out behind closed doors- very few were allowed into his studio in the Algarve. Most of Swift’s output during his life was seen -if at all- by a very small number of people that he was intimate with. Brian FallonBrian Fallon (critic)
Brian Fallon is one of Ireland's foremost art critics. He was born in 1933 at Cootehill, County Cavan, the second son of the poet Padraic Fallon, and was educated at St Peter’s College, Wexford, and Trinity College, Dublin. He was Chief Critic of The Irish Times for 35 years and its Literary...
says, "this is the typical Irish artist-intellectual of the post-war years, reared on Joyce and Baudelaire, introspective, cerebral, at once cynical and idealistic, at odds with much or most of what the society around him believed in or affected to believe in", and Aidan Dunne
Aidan Dunne
A graduate of the National College of Art and Design, Aidan Dunne was art critic of In Dublin magazine, Sunday Press and the Sunday Tribune. Currently visual arts critic of The Irish Times, Dunne has written extensively on Irish art, with essays on Michael Mulcahy, Patrick Scott, Hughie O'Donoghue,...
that Swift was a man "who seems always to have wanted nothing more than to be allowed to be himself."
If Swift was a private man he was certainly not a reclusive type. His hospitality and generosity were legendary. The house he built in the Algarve, where he would entertain most nights, was covered in his paintings. It is tempting to say Swift had some sort of an attachment to his work, yet he did, on occasion, sell, and give his work away, to people he knew; and he often simply left work behind: Hardy Bronstein, a friend, for years faithfully minded much of Swift's London work; following his break-up with Claire McAllister, he offered her a choice of the remaining pictures; he left work with a friend and with his mother in Dublin. As his temperamental tendency was also only to paint those whom he knew well, perhaps it is simply as John Ryan says: "he painted the trees and gardens he cherished and the people he loved". Swift took his responsibility to his family seriously and was not totally averse to engaging in other activities if the occasion demanded, viewing it as a temporary necessity. As Cronin says, "he was a painter... Anything else was a temporary necessity or inconvenience, boring perhaps, or, in some lights, amusing", and as Swift wrote in his notebook: "(I) do not accept that the artist should not engage in other activities though when he does he must accept a different responsibility." Apart from his Pottery, X magazine, books and building design in the Algarve, he taught ceramics in London and briefly worked as a lettings agent in the Algarve. Anthony Cronin believes that in painting the Algarve trees, “in the contemplation and re-creation of these woody, self-supporting stems and trunks with their abundant leafage he found a happiness which was not dependent on human response or the satisfactions of ambition.” Swift, according to those closest to him, was happy just to be painting. Cronin has also noted that Swift was enamoured with a certain idea of success: "Paddy‘s attitude to success, so pure and ascetic from one aspect, but also so in love with a certain idea of it. In a way he does not need to be a success, he has always been one." Swift was certainly aware of the validity of what he was doing. And it must be remembered that Swift's life was unexpectedly cut short, when he was at the peak of his powers. It may be that he had internally decided on a return to the marketplace (e.g. "All this puts me back in a situation I have purposely avoided for twenty years. But I have made the mental decision (or should that be spiritual choice) to put out my work again."- Swift in a letter to Patrick Mehigan), and to exhibiting- it has been said that he had expressed a desire for setting up a studio in Wicklow, Ireland, and showing his work there. His last -unfinished- painting is a portrait set in the Wicklow mountains of his maternal grandparents holding a baby.
Posthumous
Swift’s death in 1983 went unnoticed. Sometime after John RyanJohn Ryan (Dublin artist)
John Ryan Dublin, Ireland was an Artist, broadcaster, publisher, critic, editor, patron and publican.John Ryan was many things but primarily a key figure in Bohemian Dublin for many years. He knew nearly every artist of note that lived in, or passed through, Dublin from the 1940s onwards...
started gathering information for a book to commemorate Swift's life. Ryan, who had been suffering from ill health for many years, passed away in 1992 before he could complete his commemorative book. Veronica Jane O’Mara completed the book and 'Ps…of course' (the title of which Swift's widow was reportedly against) was published in 1993 to coincide with the IMMA retrospective exhibition, when his work was brought to Dublin. The 1993 IMMA Retrospective was acclaimed by critics and artists alike.
Brian Fallon, writing in the The Irish Times: "Certainly, from now onwards, no one can write Patrick Swift out of Irish art history." Today, however, Swift is still largely overlooked. In 2002 the Department of Foreign Affairs (who also awarded Swift the grant to study in Italy) sponsored the 'Patrick Swift: An Irish Artist In Portugal' exhibitions that were held at the Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork, and Palacio Foz in Lisbon. In 2004 Swift's work appeared on the BBC Antiques Roadshow where the BBC art critic, Stephen Somerville, was highly praising of his work, saying simply of a London tree painting, "I love it". The work shown on the ARS (a painting of Eccleston Square as seen from his studio and botanical studies of fungi painted in Ashwell) was unknown and illustrates how uncharted much of Swift’s career still is. The father of the lady who brought Swift's work to the ARS seems to have been a sort of patron of Swift’s. In 2005 the Office of Public Works, Dublin, held an exhibition of paintings, drawings and watercolours by Swift. His portrait of Patrick Kavanagh (a portrait that should be on public display) forms part of the CIÉ
CIE
-Organizations:* Cambridge International Examinations, an international examination board* Cleveland Institute of Electronics, a private technical and engineering educational institution — the International Commission on Illumination...
(Irish state transport authority) collection and recently toured as part of the ‘CIE: Art On The Move’ exhibitions to much acclaim. Two pictures by Swift, from IMMA's permanent collection, 'Forget-me-[K]nots on a Cane Table' & London Self-Portrait, were exhibited in 'The Moderns' exhibition, IMMA, October 2010- Feb 2011. Swift's work is still rarely to be seen. It would be hoped that one day there will be an exhibition of his work in England.
Swift quotes
The following are a selection of quotations by Swift taken from his Portuguese Notes (Gandon Editions Biography):Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape. Picturemaking is ludicrous in the light of the awful times we must endure. It is sufficient to contemplate the nature of composition to see that the picture itself is impossible. Each square inch of Titian contains the whole pointless- between the cradle and the grave. My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.
To paint even a bottle is dramatic. A leaf will do.
To know what it is to look at things, life as a prayer, a mass, a celebration.
One who opens his eyes and sees. To be good at seeing. How difficult not to see anything but the visible. And nothing will be left but dust and manure. Attempting the impossible. Approach the mystery.
Metaphysics- what metaphysics do those trees have?
What trace of the creature subsists in the work. It is a way of staying alone, passing the time subjected to the object - silent, still. Walk with humility in the landscape. To be some natural thing - an ancient tree - no thinking - not to think is central to the activity.
There is the modern phenomenon of the artist declaring all is void, nothing is possible, and soon is making his fortune out of despair and emptiness. I am too romantic to accept the dishonesty inherent in such a role, or perhaps it is my religious education. Such a position cannot be a religious position. (I) do not accept that the artist should not engage in other activities though when he does he must accept a different responsibility.
Life is more important than art- quantity is only important in that the amount of activity is greater not the number of works.
Obey God by living spontaneously.
Solo exhibitions
- 2005 Office of Public Works Atrium, Dublin; Paintings, drawings and watercolours by Patrick Swift.
- 2002 An Irish Painter in Portugal Retrospective, Crawford Municipal Art GalleryCrawford Municipal Art GalleryThe Crawford Municipal Art Gallery is a public art gallery in the city of Cork, Ireland.Since 1979 the Gallery has been located in the centre of Cork in what used to be the Cork Customs House, built in 1724...
, Cork. - 1994 Ulster Museum, Patrick Swift 1927-83.
- 1993 Patrick Swift 1927-83, Retrospective, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
- 1974 Pinturas de Patrick Swift, Galeria S Mamede, Lisbon; apparently the brochure is still available to buy at the Galeria's shop (key in Swift)http://www.saomamede.com/fr_pesquisa.asp
- 1965 Desenhos do Algarve, Diário de NotíciasDiário de NotíciasDiário de Notícias is a Portuguese daily newspaper, founded in Lisbon, on December 29, 1864 by Tomás Quintino Antunes and Eduardo Coelho. It gradually became one of the best known Portuguese newspapers...
Gallery, Lisbon; an exhibition of Swift's drawings for his book 'Algarve: a portrait and a guide'. - 1952 Paintings by Patrick Swift, Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin
Group exhibitions
- 'The Moderns', IMMAImmaImma is a large genus of moths in the family Immidae....
, Oct 2010- Feb 2011, includes Swift's Forget-me-[K]nots on a Cane Table & London Self-Portrait, from IMMA's permanent collection. - Lunds Konsthall, Sweden, 1972; showed Swift's Study (with Holly), a painting from Swift's first group exhibition, the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, 1950; Study (with Holly) was also exhibited at the Cork Rosc in 1980, in a show called Irish Art 1943-73.
- Portrait of Patrick Kavanagh (CIÉCIE-Organizations:* Cambridge International Examinations, an international examination board* Cleveland Institute of Electronics, a private technical and engineering educational institution — the International Commission on Illumination...
collection): RHARoyal Hibernian AcademyThe Royal Hibernian Academy is an artist-based and artist-oriented institution in Ireland, founded in Dublin in 1823.-History:The RHA was founded as the result of 30 Irish artists petitioning the government for a charter of incorporation...
, 1968; 1971 ROSC exhibition, ‘The Irish Imagination’; In 2005 it toured as part of the ‘CIE: Art On The Move’ exhibitions. - Contemporary Arts Society Exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1961; the Contemporary Arts Society bought Patrick Swift's "Garden", oil, 40 x 29.5 inches, 1959, and it was presented to Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 1961/62(painting now at Warrington Museum & Art GalleryWarrington Museum & Art GalleryWarrington Museum & Art Gallery is located on Bold Street in the Cultural Quarter of Warrington, in a Grade II listed building which it shares with the town's Central Library. The Museum and the Library originally opened in 1848 as the first rate-supported library in the UK, before moving to their...
?) - Victor Waddington Galleries, "Drawings, watercolours, gouache, ceramics", Dublin, 1954; five watercolours
- Contemporary Irish Art, National Library of WalesNational Library of WalesThe National Library of Wales , Aberystwyth, is the national legal deposit library of Wales; one of the Welsh Government sponsored bodies.Welsh is its main medium of communication...
, Aberystwth, 1953 - Leicester Galleries, Jan 1952; Plants in a Potting Shed
- Irish Exhibition of Living Art (1950, 51, 52, 54, 56)
Collections
- IMMAImmaImma is a large genus of moths in the family Immidae....
(Irish Museum of Modern Art), Permanent collection: Self-Portrait in the Studio; Forget-me-[K]nots on a cane table. (not on view) - National Portrait Gallery (London): Patrick Joseph Kavanagh, lithograph (not on view), 1956 NPG D9523.
- National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland, Limerick University: Self-Portrait, c.1950, ink on paper.http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www2.ul.ie/pp/graphics/NSPC.2002.355_-_Patrick_SwiftWEB_small_30.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www2.ul.ie/web/WWW/Administration/Vice_President_Administration_%26_Secretary/Acting_Secretary/Visual_Arts/The_Collections/NSPCI/Documentation%3Fdid%3D525005803%26pageUrl%3D/WWW/Administration/Vice%2BPresident%2BAdministration%2B%2526%2BSecretary/Acting%2BSecretary/Visual%2BArts/The%2BCollections/NSPCI/Documentation&usg=__ZzF7g3ktfd0yzo_pbbuosvJ5sSY=&h=128&w=100&sz=2&hl=en&start=34&um=1&tbnid=X2WtA3UuzwBJSM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=71&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522patrick%2Bswift%2522%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D18%26um%3D1]
- Warrington Museum & Art GalleryWarrington Museum & Art Gallery is located on Bold Street in the Cultural Quarter of Warrington, in a Grade II listed building which it shares with the town's Central Library. The Museum and the Library originally opened in 1848 as the first rate-supported library in the UK, before moving to their...
: The Garden, Oil (Reference WAGMG:1962.9). As the museum rotates work it is only occasionally on display. - Glebe GalleryGlebe GalleryGlebe House and Glebe Gallery are located just outside the town of Letterkenny near Churchill. The English portrait and landscape painter Derek Hill lived and worked there from 1954 until he presented the house and his art collection to the Irish state in 1981...
, Trees at St. Columb's - Dublin Writers MuseumDublin Writers MuseumThe Dublin Writers Museum was opened in November 1991 at No 18, Parnell Square, Dublin, Ireland. The museum occupies an original 18th-century house, which accommodates the museum rooms, library, gallery and administration area. The annexe behind it has a coffee shop and bookshop on the ground floor...
. Portrait of Patrick Kavanagh. Black crayon. On display. A gift from Swift to the doctor, Michael Solomons, who delivered his first baby, Katherine, and he in turn bequeathed the portrait to the museum. - CIE Collection, Art on the move : Portrait of Patrick Kavanagh, Oil. (currently not on view)
- The Kelly Collection (Kelly’s Resort Hotel Rosslare), Trees in London, Oil on board, Purchased 2001, published in For the Love of Art, The Kelly Collection ISBN 978-0-9565569-0-5 http://www.reddoor.ie/_images/for_the_love_of_art.pdf
![http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www2.ul.ie/pp/graphics/NSPC.2002.355_-_Patrick_SwiftWEB_small_30.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www2.ul.ie/web/WWW/Administration/Vice_President_Administration_%26_Secretary/Acting_Secretary/Visual_Arts/The_Collections/NSPCI/Documentation%3Fdid%3D525005803%26pageUrl%3D/WWW/Administration/Vice%2BPresident%2BAdministration%2B%2526%2BSecretary/Acting%2BSecretary/Visual%2BArts/The%2BCollections/NSPCI/Documentation&usg=__ZzF7g3ktfd0yzo_pbbuosvJ5sSY=&h=128&w=100&sz=2&hl=en&start=34&um=1&tbnid=X2WtA3UuzwBJSM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=71&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522patrick%2Bswift%2522%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D18%26um%3D1]](http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www2.ul.ie/pp/graphics/NSPC.2002.355_-_Patrick_SwiftWEB_small_30.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www2.ul.ie/web/WWW/Administration/Vice_President_Administration_%26_Secretary/Acting_Secretary/Visual_Arts/The_Collections/NSPCI/Documentation%3Fdid%3D525005803%26pageUrl%3D/WWW/Administration/Vice%2BPresident%2BAdministration%2B%2526%2BSecretary/Acting%2BSecretary/Visual%2BArts/The%2BCollections/NSPCI/Documentation&usg=__ZzF7g3ktfd0yzo_pbbuosvJ5sSY=&h=128&w=100&sz=2&hl=en&start=34&um=1&tbnid=X2WtA3UuzwBJSM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=71&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2522patrick%2Bswift%2522%26ndsp%3D18%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26start%3D18%26um%3D1]</li>
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Essays by Swift
- Patrick Swift on David Wright, PN Review 14, Volume 6 Number 6, July - August 1980.
- ‘Mob Morals and the Art of loving Art’, Anthology of X (1988) & 'X' A Quarterly Review, vol. I, no.3, June 1960
- ‘Prolegomenon to George Barker’. X 1960. Later appeared in John Heath-Stubbs and Martin Green (eds) Homage to George Barker on his 60th Birthday (Martin Brian & O’Keefe, London, 1973
- ‘The Painter in the Press’ (under the pseudonym James Mahon ), X A Quarterly Review, vol. I, no.4, October 1960. read here
- ‘Official Art & The Modern Painter’ (under the pseudonym James Mahon), X A Quarterly Review, vol. I, no., November, 1959
- ‘Some notes on Caravaggio’, Nimbus 1956.
- ‘By Way of Preface’, from a Report to the Committee of Cultural Relations, Dept of External Affairs, on a Year spent in Italy in the study of Art & Painting, December 1955. read here
- ‘The Artist Speaks’, Envoy - A Review of Literature and Art, Vol. 4, no. 15, Feb 1951
- ‘Painting – The RHA Exhibition’, The Bell, Vol. 17, no. 13, June 1951.
- 'The Bomberg Papers', edited by Swift, X, Vol.1, no.3, June 1960; An Anthology from X.
- ‘Nano Reid’, Envoy – A Review of Literature and Art, March 1950. read here
Further reading
- Irish Times. Aidan DunneAidan DunneA graduate of the National College of Art and Design, Aidan Dunne was art critic of In Dublin magazine, Sunday Press and the Sunday Tribune. Currently visual arts critic of The Irish Times, Dunne has written extensively on Irish art, with essays on Michael Mulcahy, Patrick Scott, Hughie O'Donoghue,...
writing on the CIE collection which includes Swift's Kavanagh portrait:
-
- "Patrick Swift's portrait of Patrick Kavanagh, for example, is positively iconic. Painted in London in 1961, it is ambitious in scale and scope, giving an account of the writer as a monumental - though somewhat truculent - figure. No single viewpoint could give us the view of Kavanagh's head that Swift offers. It is as if he unfolds a conventional three- dimensional image in a quasi-cubist manner."
- Brian O'Doherty, a.k.a. Patrick Ireland, artist and critic writes about Swift in 'Irish Painting, 1953: Some Thoughts', The Irish Monthly. On Swif's painting of a cabbage: "Patrick Swift's adventurous, deeply interesting and brilliant painting of? A cabbage!..."http://www.jstor.org/pss/20516709 View said cabage:http://painterpatrickswift.blogspot.com/2009/11/still-life-with-cabbage.html
- David Wright Obituary in The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-david-wright-1446202.html
- Shifting Ground, The Moderns, Irish Art 1950’s, 08/10/2010 http://themoderns.ebowdev.com/content/files/shifting_ground.pdf
- 20th Century British and Irish Art, Writings by Art Commentator and Historian Adrian Clark, March 2011 http://www.britishandirishart.co.uk/reviews/william-scott-irish-artists/
- Twenty years of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Irish Times, AIDAN DUNNE, March 19, 2011 ("Patrick Swift... numbered among the highlights of Irish artists") http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0319/1224292576206.html
- Link to David Wright portrait. Mentions they first met in London in 1953. Also mentions that at that period Swift had a studio in Camden. Between 1959 and 1962 Swift had a studio in Eccelston Square. http://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/patrick-swift-1927-1983-1-c-dv3nhs28k3
- Irish Independent. A note on Swift’s Kavanagh portrait. http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/on-a-london-street-on-an-autumn-day-73345.html
- Sotheby's http://www.sothebys.com/
- AskArt http://www.askart.com/askart/artist.aspx?artist=11073744
- Whytes (Irish Auctioneers) www.whytes.i.e. (key in 'Swift' only) http://www.whytes.ie/newindexcurrent3.asp
- Adams (Irish Auctioneers) www.adams.i.e. (key in 'Swift' only) http://www.adams.ie/BidCat/SearchResults.asp?category=&keywords=swift&status=A&Submit+now.x=0&Submit+now.y=0&Submit+now=Submit+now
- Travel Books by Swift http://patrickswifttravelbooks.blogspot.com/search/label/Travel%20Books%20Home%20Page
- Interview with Anthony Cronin, by Maurice Fitzpatrick http://www.mauricefitzpatrick.org/Maurice/Articles.html
- A poem by Basil PayneBasil Payne- Life and work :Payne was educated at Synge Street CBS and University College Dublin. In the 1960s he held many poetry readings in Dublin, and in 1964 he won a Guinness International poetry prize, followed by another Guinness International prize in 1966...
on Swift's Kavanagh portrait http://www.basilpayne.net/selected/optimism/kavanagh.pdf - TCD (Trinity College Dublin) link with photo of Kavanagh's wedding with a picture by Swift in the background- click 'photos' http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.tcd.ie/English/patrickkavanagh/kavanaghweddingcake.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.tcd.ie/English/patrickkavanagh/kavanaghweddingcake.html&usg=__WMlDF5q7Hltz1HOEnL3o3yWF-Wo=&h=789&w=795&sz=77&hl=en&start=15&zoom=1&tbnid=mr2n9xE5cqJf0M:&tbnh=142&tbnw=143&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpatrick%2Bkavanagh%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:1&itbs=1
- Patrick Kavanagh list: “drank in celebration of the accidental destruction of the Abbey Theatre by fire with Anthony Cronin, John Ryan, and Paddy Swift (‘It gave great pleasure to all the right people’) ” http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/k/Kavanagh,Patrick/life.htm
- Link to where James Liddy, an Irish poet, mentions Swift and Kavanagh in McDaids after Kavanagh's UCD lecture in 1956: "The painter Paddy Swift is there, a dark Prince Hallish to Kavanagh's Falstaff." http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/new_hibernia_review/v012/12.2.liddy.html
- Catalogue for Swift's Victor Waddington Galleries exhibition, 1952, held at the National Library of Ireland http://hip.nli.ie/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=126X0902S420F.86466&profile=mss&uri=link=3100007~!358771~!3100001~!3100002&aspect=advanced&menu=search&ri=1&source=~!horizon&term=Paintings+by+Patrick+Swift+at+the+Victor+Waddington+Galleries%2C+8+South+Anne+Street%2C+Dublin&index=ALLTITL#focus
- Lilly Library, Indian University, has many of the ‘X’ magazine’s files. http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/lilly/mss/html/x.html
- Irish Times. A note on the unveiling of a plaque in memory of Swift at his Hatch Street Studio http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/1998/1022/98102200099.html
- Irish Independent. Article on the artist Michael Farrell (Says he knew Swift in Soho) http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/news-gossip/pictures-of-passion-and-pain-124223.html
- Irish Times. Interview with Irish art collector Lambert where "asked who he would consider to be most seriously under-celebrated of modern Irish artists, Lambert replies with a hint of regret: 'Patrick Swift, a fine artist.'http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2000/0113/00011300091.html
- Irish Independent. Article on John Jordan. “Lady Longford, who lived near the young Jordan, lent him Ulysses at the beginning of his last year in school; he read it in the "quite preposterously romantic setting" of Woodenbridge, Co Wicklow, that September with the painter Patrick Swift” http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/watchful-eye-with-a-shrewd-and-expressive-turn-of-phrase-131527.html
- Irish Independent on Freud, A magical recluse http://www.independent.ie/unsorted/features/freud-a-magical-recluse-amp-a-unique-art-opportunity-54377.html
- Irish artist Reginald GrayReginald Gray (artist)Reginald Gray is a portrait artist born in Dublin in 1930. He studied at The National College of Art and then moved to London, becoming part of the School of London led by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. In 1960, he painted a portrait of Bacon which now hangs in the permanent...
: "Back in 1951 when I started painting I rented a studio in Leeson Street. It was a wonderful atmosphere. The painter Neville Johnson had his studio a few doors away and facing me was the studio of the German artist Helmut Mueller. Round the corner in Hatch Street, Patrick Swift was installed and used to let Lucian Freud share his place each time that Freud visited Dublin."http://reginaldgray.blogspot.com/ - Lucian Freud Obituary, Financial Times: "Freud had become part of the bohemian Soho-based milieu of artists and intellectuals who included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Ron Kitaj and the Irish painter and writer Patrick Swift, who published some of Freud’s early works in his cultural review X Magazine." http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/05e77002-b3c9-11e0-855b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1Udbwi39E
- Swift Images http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickswift1927-83/
- "Patrick Swift's portrait of Patrick Kavanagh, for example, is positively iconic. Painted in London in 1961, it is ambitious in scale and scope, giving an account of the writer as a monumental - though somewhat truculent - figure. No single viewpoint could give us the view of Kavanagh's head that Swift offers. It is as if he unfolds a conventional three- dimensional image in a quasi-cubist manner."
