A Family (painting) - Background and Influences

Background and Influences

A Family belongs to the artist's Grey Period (1951-55). Widely acknowledged as the artist's masterpiece from this period, the painting marks a shift in palette from the comparatively colourful work of the late forties to predominant whites and greys. The art critic John Berger writes in Art News and Review: 'His style has developed and changed; his colours are pale and severe - the Family is mostly grey; his forms, in their movement both across and into the picture, are precise. This finesse implies - because le Brocquy's motive is always human - a tenderness which is not sentimental, and a sense of wonder which is exact; one thinks twice about the quite ordinary but in fact miraculous construction of any man's back, having looked at the father in the Family.'

According to the art critic John Russell: 'In the early 1950s, above all, he came before us as a man who was looking for the image that would compound all other images. Anyone who was around at the time and concerned with what was called "post-war British art" will remember the painting called "A Family".' Louis le Brocquy explains: 'I have always been fascinated by the horizontal monumentality of traditional Odalisque painting, the reclining woman depicted voluptuously by one Master after another throughout the history of European art - Titians' Venus of Urbino, Velázquez' Rokeby Venus turning her back on the Spanish Court, Goya's Maja clothed and unclothed, Ingres' Reclining Odalisque in her seraglio and finally the great Olympia of Édouard Manet celebrating his favourite model, Victorine Meurent. My own painting A Family was conceived in 1950 in very different circumstances in face of the atomic threat, social upheaval and refugees of World WarII and its aftermath. The elements in its composition correspond in some ways to those of Olympia, if not to Manet's cool sensuality. The female figure in A Family may be seen to take on a very different significance. The man, replacing Manet's black servant with bouquet, sits alone. The bouquet is reduced to a mere wisp held by a child. The Olympian black cat in turn becomes white, ominously emerging from the sheets. This is how A Family appears to me today. Fifty years ago it was painted while contemplating a human condition stripped back to Palaeolithic circumstance under electric light bulbs.'