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Lot Essay
Dillon first travelled to the Irish countryside in the summer of 1939 with his friend, Ernie Atkins. Although during his childhood Dillon had been on short trips to the mountains around Belfast and had visited Dublin, it was this cycling holiday that gave him first-hand experience of the Ireland that he would immortalise in his paintings. He was entranced both by the surrounding landscape and the people that he encountered there.
James White comments that Dillon's 'first glimpses of Connemara with its mountain ranges and rugged coast-line took his breath away. Many of the people spoke Irish and even when they spoke English, they made it sound like a different language. Something of its freshness and the simplicity of the lives lived by the people caught him unawares. For the rest of his life he was to be moved to see its surroundings and its occupants as symbols of the country he had dimly dreamt of and idyllically desired to belong to' (see Gerard Dillon: An Illustrated Biography, Dublin, 1994, p. 34).
Connemara Lads belongs to a group of works that Dillon painted in which he placed the figures out of a contemporary context and instead has imbued them with a sense of timelessness. The two young men, dressed almost identically, stand side by side, each one mirroring the other's stance, with their feet apart, hands in pockets and heads turned in the same direction. In 1964 Dillon expressed his fascination for the locals that he came across in Connemara, 'These people are a race apart, very friendly and polite, they never intrude. They carry this politeness to a degree unbelievable to me ... These people are strange, buried deep in themselves. If you have the gift you can draw them out and you might find another crock of gold' ('Connemara is Ireland to Me' , Ireland of the Welcomes, quoted in J. White, op. cit., p. 72).
James White comments that Dillon's 'first glimpses of Connemara with its mountain ranges and rugged coast-line took his breath away. Many of the people spoke Irish and even when they spoke English, they made it sound like a different language. Something of its freshness and the simplicity of the lives lived by the people caught him unawares. For the rest of his life he was to be moved to see its surroundings and its occupants as symbols of the country he had dimly dreamt of and idyllically desired to belong to' (see Gerard Dillon: An Illustrated Biography, Dublin, 1994, p. 34).
Connemara Lads belongs to a group of works that Dillon painted in which he placed the figures out of a contemporary context and instead has imbued them with a sense of timelessness. The two young men, dressed almost identically, stand side by side, each one mirroring the other's stance, with their feet apart, hands in pockets and heads turned in the same direction. In 1964 Dillon expressed his fascination for the locals that he came across in Connemara, 'These people are a race apart, very friendly and polite, they never intrude. They carry this politeness to a degree unbelievable to me ... These people are strange, buried deep in themselves. If you have the gift you can draw them out and you might find another crock of gold' ('Connemara is Ireland to Me' , Ireland of the Welcomes, quoted in J. White, op. cit., p. 72).