Patrick Swift

A gift from the artist to his friend Clive Adams, circa 1963, and thence by descent to the present owner

The canvas is laid on board and is in good overall condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a simple wood frame.
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Executed circa 1963, Olive Tree was painted shortly after Swift moved from London to Carvoeiro, in the Algarve, Portugal and is an important early example of the freer style he developed there.  Having moved to the Algarve in 1962, he set up a traditional pottery workshop at Porches with the Portuguese painter Lima de Freitas. In contrast to the urban context of the city which he had begun to find creatively restrictive, his new experience of the warm Mediterranean landscape, colour and light completely reinvigorated his work and resulted in the confident handling, bold impasto and strong tones evident in the present work and Algarve Landscape (lot 30).

Born in Dublin, Swift studied at the National College of Art and Design and having originally worked for the Dublin Gas company, he became a full time painter in the late 1940s and in 1956, after a travelling scholarship took him to France and Italy, he moved to London and quickly settled into the bohemian life there becoming friends with luminaries such as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Together with the poet David Wright, he founded and edited an important literary magazine X which published articles by keys artistic figures such as Alberto Giacommetti. He maintained his friendship with Wright after the move to Portugal and together with Lima de Freitas, the three artists wrote and illustrated a series of three Portuguese travel books.

Swift was the subject of a major retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in 1993 and in 2002, The Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork, organized an exhibition entitled Patrick Swift, An Irish Painter in Portugal which focused more specifically on the creative energy he experienced in Portugal.