The Artist’s Wife and Family with Dog at Errisbeg

Painted in the later stages of the artist’s career in 1952, Maurice MacGonigal’s The Artist’s Wife and Family with Dog at Errisbeg explores Ireland’s dramatic coastal mountainous landscape. The painted scene depicts the Errisbeg Mountain seaside, situated between the historical fishing village of Roundstone and the road to Clifden, near where the artist and his family owned a summer home. A number of smaller works by MacGonigal were produced in the Connemara area during this period, however few at the same scale as this particular work. Reflecting on his father’s art career, Ciarán MacGonigal states that this painting is the best that his father ever produced.

‘The painter’s working method is typified here in the handling of the great boulders which litter the shore. MacGonigal, like his friend and colleague Sean Keating, tended to eliminate or at least simplify, the range of mid-tones’ (K. McConkey, A Free Spirit: Irish Art 1860-1960, London, 1990, p. 176). Throughout the painting, sunlight creates bold highlights and shadows giving a true sense of depth to the landscape, while emphasising the artist’s family sitting in the foreground. Stark divisions of dominant rock formations separate the land with cool whites, rust-coloured ochres and greens, in turn leading the eye upwards in segments from the base of the canvas in the coastline to the elevated fields and beyond. The houses behind the sitters are known to have belonged to the Blackadder family, known to have been agents for landed families until the late 1940s.

Amongst the rocks sits Maurice’s wife Aïda, resting with her sons, Ciarán and Muiris and the family dog. Aïda was herself an artist and art critic, writing regularly for The Leader under several aliases. In her late teens, she modelled for a number of artists including Charles Wheeler and Oliver Shepherd, whose 1935 marble relief of Aïda is held in the Crawford Gallery, Cork. Dominating the background, the imposing foot of Errisbeg Mountain obstructs the sky, exaggerating the intensity of the Irish landscape. This sense of grandeur, richness of colour and attention to detail that MacGonigal incorporates, captures the rugged beauty of the Irish coastline and the artist’s affection for his country.

During this time, Errisbeg was thought to hold deposits of Gold and Copper, illustrated by the large rust-coloured rocks in MacGonigal’s painting. Despite the land being described by investors as ‘the Irish El Dorado’ (C. MacGonigal, quoted in a personal letter, September 2014), only little amounts of both elements were found. Instead the central focus of the area remained farming and fishing.

Maurice’s son, Ciarán, recounts the day he visited where his father painted this work with excellent detail: ‘The day remains vivid to me as I found a mess of hooks in the rivulet…and showed them to my father as he was painting and I can still recall the deadly quiet way he said to me, “… put that back, it belongs to the Douanes and Conneelys …” when I pressed the matter he said “… look just do it … they were poachers and the water bailiff would have gone mad ...’ (Ciarán MacGonigal, ibid.)

We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.