Alicia Boyle (1908-1997) Studio Sale

This auction represents the residual works of the studio of Alicia Boyle extending to 400 lots offered without reserve.

Alicia Boyle RBA
1908 - 1997

Alicia Boyle was born in Bangkok, Thailand in 1908. Her father was appointed to the British Dock Company at Bangkok, but in 1909, returned to Derry where Boyle spent her childhood. The family moved to London in 1920 where Boyle attended the Clapham Art Training College followed by the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting under Francis Ernest Jackson. In 1932, while still a student, Boyle exhibited in the Royal Academy of Arts annual show.

After graduating, Boyle taught part-time in numerous art schools across England, along with lecturing and painting. In 1938, Boyle received an invitation to the School of Fine Art in Mykonos. In her words, the residency allowed Boyle to 'shake off the inhibitions of tradition'. Works of this period include Lots 12, 93, 388 and 389.

At the outbreak of World War II, Boyle settled in England working as a teacher at the Northampton School of Art. In 1944, she exhibited with the Leicester Gallery and held her first one-woman show at the Peter Jones Gallery. By the early fifties, London galleries, like the Leger Galleries, welcomed her work. She was also exhibiting in the Irish Living Art Exhibition and at Victor Waddington's gallery in Dublin. In 1950, Boyle was recognised in the Arts News and Review magazine, the original self-portrait reproduced in the paper is included in this auction along with correspondence from the publishers (Lot 380).

In the 1950s, Boyle painted in France, Mallorca (Lots 145, 296, 354), and Spain (Lots 4, 143, 246). On Boyle's first visit to Spain, she said it 'proved to be unexpectedly stimulating, the grandeur and richness of the landscape.' Throughout her life, Boyle took painting excursions to Ireland and in 1969, saw the building of her studio at Reenacapull (Lots 178, 181, 252, and 230) near Bantry, to which she moved in 1971.

In 1983, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland held a retrospective of her work. This was followed by retrospective exhibitions at the Gordon Gallery, Crawford Municipal Gallery, and Irish Museum of Modern Art. Her work is included in the public collections of the Bank of Ireland, Irish Arts Council, National Gallery of Ireland and the National Self Portrait Collection of Ireland.

Adams Blackrock, April 2026

Dr Hilary Pyle wrote the following in 1998 regarding the work of Alicia Boyle:

"Though Alicia Boyle may have been neglected by critics during the latter part of her lifetime, her work is represented in many public and private collections throughout Ireland and in the 1980s she was honoured with two major retrospectives - one travelling from Belfast to Derry to Wexford, the other from Cork to Dublin.

Critical wariness is understandable. While her family originally came from North Derry (to which she returned as an infant from her birthplace, Bangkok), Alicia Boyle spent much of her working life in England. As an exhibitor, therefore, she came late to the Irish scene. She was difficult to box. She defied any label. Her work still refuses to be categorised.

A London exhibition at the age of eighty was appropriate for an Irish artist who commenced her painting career by exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1932. This was not turning full circle for her, but rather a rotating in the ellipse that fascinated her and which kept recurring in her work. She continued to paint up until about 1994.

Her first commissions included a mural for the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London. At the time she felt a kinship with Paul Nash and with David Jones, whose exhibitions she attended. She also liked the early Graham Sutherland; and she would never forget the major Chinese exhibition of 1936, and Hokusai, who became her master in pen and ink drawing. A scholarship to Greece, which she took up courageously despite soundings of war, brought about a lasting effect in her attitude to colour, and to her sense of light.

The fruits of her voluminous reading, fostered by her mother who was so close to her, and who had theatre (particularly Shakespeare), ballet and music a natural part of her daily diet, stayed with her through her life. She was rereading Proust continually. A book by Laurence Binyon was her most precious possession. In her library she had illustrated books about Constable, Klee, Klimt, Munch, Palmer, Stanley Spencer and a host of other artists. And to the poets and prose writers she had read at an early stage, she added many more, most recently the Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott, and Derry's Seamus Heaney. She was reading Heaney's most recent collection, The Spirit Level, when she died.

Through the early years in London, she exhibited with the forward-looking London Group, when Victor Pasmore was one of them, and during the forties she was invited to exhibit with the Artists of Fame and Promise at the Leicester Galleries. Shortly after the war, she turned to Ireland as her source of inspiration.

She had suddenly felt the urgency of her Irish origins. Greek light, she used to say and write, is not like any other light. It comes from everywhere. Irish light strikes up out of the ground. On that ground she walked. She painted that ground.

She then began to exhibit in Ireland - in both Belfast and Dublin - showing studies of Irish farmers, mythical dramas such as her oil The White Horse, and landscapes which Horace Shipp, writing in the Apollo in 1949 described as a Celtic inheritance. The writer and art critic John Hewitt was another devotee of her work.

She left Farnham in Surrey, where she had been teaching, to settle in West Cork in 1971, and it was there that I first met her the following summer. She was living, for the first time since she was a child, in the Irish landscape - permanently in the scape.

A lengthy drive to Bantry, and ten miles beyond that to Durrus and Reenacapull (Promontory of the Horses), brought me up a rocky hill and a stony winding road to the cottage that was her home.

She was framed by the welcoming half-door as she approached down the path with shining eyes and extended hand, and together we gazed down at Foot Island, where she often drew and painted, and at the Atlantic view below her house. Conversation of glass-like clarity followed, over tea and spiced biscuits.

Many were the conversations that followed over many years, rooting around artistic innovations and concepts, laughing over the deeds of people and painters, relishing the manic quality of man - and woman - and always coming back to one central thought, the necessity for good drawing and an understanding of light in good painting.

From time to time she had written poetry, for herself, and she introduced me to her occasional writings on art, describing how her technique had opened up to her through extraordinary personal views of Nature. 'The Search for Form' was published in Introspect, edited by Patrick Pye and other artists, in 1976; and 'A Journey through Line and Colour' appeared under a shorter title in the catalogue of her 1988 retrospective in Cork. Some years before she had written 'How do I go about a painting?' (August 1980). All are semi-autobiographical analyses, contemplative, inspired and illuminating.

She became a meditator soon after her return to Ireland, which opened up new, stimulating friendships, and deepened her subject matter. Some of the most radiant and confident paintings date from those years in West Cork, where at last she was free from the trammels of her life as a teacher, and could devote herself wholeheartedly to her painting. She continued to visit exhibitions at home and abroad, including the monumental Post-Impressionism mounted at the Royal Academy in London (1979-1980), and other major shows. Her conversation and discussions about art were piquant, probing and elating.

Nearly eighty, she moved to Monkstown in Dublin, where she continued to 'paint the weeds on her doorstep' as she had always done, until she was confined to her upstairs apartment, and painted mainly from sketches.

Yet she remained thoroughly in touch with the outside world, through radio, through constant reading of the newest (as well as favourite old) books and art catalogues through her opera glasses, and through her few elect or chance visitors.

Her imagination worked continually up until the end. Even during a period as a patient in Clontarf Clinic, she was drawing inmates while in the Physiotherapy Room, sketches that she worked up later into one of her last oils. Some builder's plastic blowing on the lawn below the window of her flat one day made her reach for her drawing pen again. The drawing in her mind became 'Nuns on the Lawn'.

The ordinary wild plant was translated by her into the extraordinary. A common weed could become as high as an electric pylon. From her eagle's nest flat in Monkstown she enjoyed hearing about the notice on the road below which she could not see - 'Heavy Plant Crossing'!

But in her art she never progressed from the extraordinary to the absurd. The analogies she saw between the animate and inanimate, between a tree and a man, were always rooted in her feet, solidly on the earth, and in the Nature she loved."

Dr Hilary Pyle, September 1998