Among the many new records set for Irish art at auction in the past few years was £441,500 sterling made at Christie's in May 1999. This was the price paid for The Bridge, a typical example of the work of the Northern Irish painter John Luke, another one of whose pictures comes up for sale at Sotheby's in London next Wednesday.
Landscape, lot 41 in an auction of modern British and Irish art, carries a surprisingly modest estimate - £30,000 to £40,000 - considering the prices Luke can now fetch; prior to the 1999 figure, the previous record for one of his pictures was £194,000 for Landscape with Figures sold at Christie's two years earlier. This Landscape, signed and dated 1935, is entirely characteristic of his best work. It has his customarily stylised and dreamlike quality in which the fields and mountains represented have been turned into a sequence of receding sculptures depicted in contrasting but complementary colours. But it is distinguished in two ways from many of Luke's other paintings.
To begin with, the picture has been executed in oils rather than the tempera which would become the artist's favourite medium and secondly, this landscape is quite unmistakably Irish. This is apparent not just because of the whitewashed cottages, but even more so by the neat pile of turf depicted in the foreground. It is a psychedelic reinterpretation of an archetypal Paul Henry Irish scene. In this respect, Luke may be considered a formalised anarchist who took traditional forms and subverted them through colour and form while leaving the most important elements clearly identifiable. There is a terrific sense of order and discipline running through all his work and this is reflected in the memories of those who knew him.
The sculptor F E McWilliam, who was at the Slade School of Art with Luke and shared a studio with him, recalled that the painter "was meticulous in everything, very tidy". That tidiness is apparent in his pictures in which nothing has been left to chance. This may be why Luke enjoyed working in tempera, a difficult medium which demands its user know exactly what needs to be done before beginning. Luke was born in Belfast in 1906 into a large family which had little money; he therefore had relatively little formal schooling and his artistic education was achieved thanks to awards and scholarships. After spending a few years in London during the 1920s, he returned to Northern Ireland and for a long time, was almost unknown beyond the local audience.
He was 40 when his first one-man show took place at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery. Here some of Luke's work was seen by James White, who wrote that the artist had "achieved colour tones of a purity, and textural values of a quality unequalled by any painter of the past three centuries whose work I know".
White was especially delighted with Luke's The Three Dancers which is now in the Ulster Museum. Most of his work continued to be done in Belfast, where he was invited to paint a number of large murals, one on the tympanum of the inner dome in the City Hall representing The Life and History of Belfast. The artist spent 16 months on this project, which led to the commission for a similar work in Belfast's Provincial Masonic Lodge. But by the early 1960s, he had almost stopped working due to ill-health and few pictures were produced over more than a decade before his death in 1975.
Luke's exquisitely coloured decorative paintings are distinctive and easily identifiable. They stand entirely outside the canon of 20th century modernism and could in some respects be considered anachronistic, certainly as regards their method of production.
Because of the trouble he took over everything produced, Luke could be thought as much a craftsman as an artist, although he obviously possessed an extremely refined eye for colour and line. It would be extraordinary if this picture did not surpass its estimate.
