PIERROT WITH PAINTING OF KING WILLIAM III
Gerard Dillon (1916-1971)Gerard Dillon was born and raised in Belfast. After working in London as a painter and decorator, in 1930 he began to paint pictures, a sphere in which he was largely self-taught. Caught in Ireland by the outbreak of the S...Read more
Gerard Dillon was born and raised in Belfast. After working in London as a painter and decorator, in 1930 he began to paint pictures, a sphere in which he was largely self-taught. Caught in Ireland by the outbreak of the Second World War and, due to travel restrictions, unable to return to England, he decided to move to Dublin. There he held his first one-man exhibition in February 1942. Immediately his talent was recognised, the Irish Times (24 February 1942) commenting of his exhibition that he could “put the breath of life” into his pictures. Thereafter, mainly through the annual ‘Living Art’ exhibitions, Dillon made a reputation for himself and shortly came to be regarded, along with a number of his Northern confreres - George Campbell, Nevill Johnson, Dan O’Neill - as one of the most interesting Irish painters of his generation, his subject matter increasingly drawn from the West, from the Aran Islands and Connemara in particular. His early return to London after the war, however, meant that the west of Ireland did not quite monopolise his work as it might otherwise have done.
But besides Dublin and the West, Dillon spent a good deal of time during the war years in Belfast. There, in the wake of the Blitz of 1941, in pictures such as Result of a Raid and Blitzed Landscape he set down with a strong sense of pathos the uneasy life he found around him, notably for those “little shuffling people”, as the poet and critic John Hewitt once called them1, whose homes had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe. Dillon was clearly moved by these events and his memories of the hardships of civilian life during the war remained with him.
It is in the context of his war-time experiences that Pierrot with Painting of King William III should be judged. Here, on what was to be the eve of another period of thirty years’ ‘war’ in Northern Ireland - although Dillon, of course did not know that at the time - the pathos of his previous experiences returns, although in a more sophisticated manner. The picture is essentially autobiographical, Dillon in his paintings having often presented himself as a pierrot, as James White commented, a figure that enabled him “to enter a dream world of escape from the present”2. In many of his pierrot pictures, White says, Dillon “came nearest to a truly poetic expression … far removed from the realities and pains of daily life”, something which, in the late 1960s, was an escape for him from the Northern conflict, “which was never far from his mind”3.
As in many of Dillon’s pictures, there is a degree of humour in Pierrot with Painting of King William III. The imagery is deeply ironic, the pierrot being cast as an Orangeman wearing a traditional bowler hat and orange sash, symbols of all that the artist abhorred about Ulster life, as is the portrait of King William of Orange, triumphantly astride his traditional white horse, an image that harks back to a distant past that Dillon felt no part of. The expression on the pierrot’s face appears to be of benign amusement, but in fact represents incredulity at what is happening in his native land. The brisk handling of paint throughout - notably in the figure of King William and the head of the pierrot - indicates the spontaneity of the picture’s execution and, sadly in this instance, recalls James White’s observation that Dillon knew that the way to make a work of art was “to pluck the image hot out of experience”4. As in this picture, the juxtaposition of different images, which appear to have little direct connection, is a device frequently employed by Dillon. It was an influence he took from Irish High Crosses of the Early Christian period and, later, absorbed from Chagall, whom he much admired5.
1 John Hewitt, ‘Under Forty: some Ulster Artists’, Now in Ulster, 1944, p.34
2 James White, Gerard Dillon: An Illustrated Biography, 1994
3 Ibid, p.103
4 Ibid, p.104
5 Gerard Dillon, ‘The Artist Speaks’, Envoy, February 1951, p.9
Dr S. B. Kennedy
Belfast, March 2004
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