Lot No: 45

William Crozier HRHA (b.1930)

THE DARK BARN, 1988

Published Estimate: €20000-30000
Price Realised: €26000

signed, titled and dated on reverse
oil on canvas
117 by 132cm., 46 by 52in.



Born in Glasgow in 1930 of Irish parents, William Crozier studied at the Glasgow School of Art. While developing a very successful career in England, becoming Head of Painting at Winchester School of Art in 1968, Crozier maintained strong links to Ireland. He stayed in Dublin in the 1950s when he became friends with Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin and returned to the country regularly in the following decades. He took up his Irish citizenship and, in 1984, he bought a house at Kilcoe, near Skibbereen, Co. Cork. The local landscape, soon to become a major theme in his work, featured in a major mid-term retrospective exhibition at the RHA and the Crawford Gallery, Cork in 1990 -91. One of the largest exhibitions of Crozier’s work ever held, it sparked widespread interest in his work amongst the Irish public. In 1992 Crozier was made an ARHA. The landscape of West Cork is central to many of the paintings in the current sale which date to this period of discovery.

Crozier’s approach differs from Irish landscape artists of his generation through its often dramatic scale, its vibrant colour and its bringing together of diverse shapes, forms and textures. While aware of the landscape tradition in Irish art such as that of Jack Yeats and Paul Henry, Crozier brings to bear a range of other traditions to this subject. The maintenance of a studio in England and travelling widely has enabled Crozier to retain an international perspective on the local landscape. His attitude reflects Kavanagh’s idea of privileging the best of the local, while retaining a sense of universality. Apart from European and American expressionism, Crozier’s understanding of the theme of landscape is also indebted to his interest in Italian primitivism and to the classical tradition of Claude Lorrain which centres on the notion of controlling nature and sculpting the land into manmade proportions. His almost childlike choice of form and colour highlight the visual complexity of the natural world while his flattening and simplification of form privilege the authority of art over nature.

Crozier’s fixation on specific motifs such as trees and rivers relates to this much older approach to landscape. The Dark Barn (lot 45) considers how the black form of the building intrudes into the nocturnal landscape. Its strange shape is inspired by a distinctive local tradition of building barns in Hampshire. As Crozier describes it, ‘They [the barns] have gone home to the landscape.... Their backsides squat in the grass’ . A shaft of blue light to the left of the barn coupled with the bright red shapes of the bushes to its right counteract the opacity of the black structure and evoke the disruptive reality of nature in all its glorious colours and shapes.

Dr. Roisin Kennedy,

May, 2010

ed. K. Crouan, S.B. Kennedy, W. Vann, William Crozier, Lund Humphries, 2007, p.41.