Patrick Swift (1927—83) Artist born in Dublin, Ireland

Patrick Swift was a painter and key cultural figure in both Dublin and London before moving to the Algarve in southern Portugal, where he is buried in the town of Porches.

In Dublin he was part of the Envoy arts review / McDaid's pub circle of artistic and literary figures that included Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, Brendan Behan, et al. He later moved to London where he became an integral member of the Soho set that included Francis Bacon, George Barker, Elizabeth Smart, et al. In London he founded and co-edited - with the poet David Wright — the legendary ‘X’ magazine which Swift used to promote artists such as Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Craigie Atchison and David Bomberg (whose posthumous papers Swift edited).

In Portugal he continued painting while also writing and illustrating books on Portugal and founding (with the Portuguese artist Lima de Freitas) Porches Pottery which revived a dying industry.

During his career Swift only held two solo exhibitions: Dublin in 1952 and Lisbon in 1974. His first exhibition at the Waddington Gallery in 1952 was highly acclaimed. For Swift, however, his art seems to have been a very personal and private matter, and he appears to have shown little interest in exhibiting. David Wright recalled finding him actively hiding his work because he was expecting a millionaire art collector to visit. He also distrusted publicity, which he shunned, and celebrity, which he disliked. This aversion to publicity means that, even while he was at the heart of artistic activity in London and Dublin, there is scant information to be found on Swift. By his death in 1983 Swift, save for his intimate friends, had been forgotten by the art world. Most thought that he had long since stopped painting. In 1993 the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) held a retrospective of Swift's work. Again, the exhibition received great critical acclaim, with fellow artists such as Derek Hill (Irish Times, 24 January 1994) declaring Swift to be “probably the most formidable Irish artist of this century”.

Style more less

Although he commented on art and was intimate with many leading artists of his day, Swift never affiliated with any official or quasi-official art group or ‘style’. John Ryan (artist, patron, founder of the arts magazine Envoy) in his introduction to Swift for the Rosc catalogue, 1971:

“He painted the trees and gardens he cherished and the people he loved; because he was, happily, not unduly concerned, a style that came naturally to him shortly became his own distinctive 'style' - his signature - as uniquely his own as the subject content. Swift's peculiar style reminds us of nobody but the artist - a telling point with a painter who has set no store on this aspect of the job. In Swift we have, then, a man with an observation that is both curious and affectionate - for his attention to details in his subject is paternal and not academic.”

Fernando De Azvedo (painter and President of Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, Lisbon) writing in Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter In Portugal, produced for the Crawford Gallery exhibition in 2001:

"He did not allow himself to simply accept the nascent effervescence of post-war English art, although he did live in its midst and analysed it and commented upon it He maintained both a love of the figurative that he was never to relinquish, and a lack of interest in, and even an aversion to abstraction, geometric or otherwise.... Among his various influences we feel the presence of Giacometti and his infinite veils of grey, obsessively covering and uncovering a tortured and secret face These affinities were not enough to deflect him from his intuitive self. They constituted less a deliberate career focus and more a faith in an inner order, that manifested itself in his painting and writing. The artist distanced himself from fashion in order to grasp the permanent element which he believed he must seek in the world of painting, not just in that of his own day, but in that of all time, and in the relationship between art, reality and its interpretation."

He can be described as a figurative painter. Though his style changed considerably over the years, his essential personality as an artist never did. He was plainly not interested in the formalist aspects of Modernism. He wanted art to have an expressive, emotive, even psychological content, though not in any literary sense. Anthony Cronin, who was close to Swift for many years, says that for Swift “painting was a re-creation of what the painter saw: in his own case at least not what the painter had seen or could imagine, but what he was actually looking at during the act of painting. A faithfulness of the sort was part of the bargain, part of his contract with his art [which] had nothing to do with descriptionWhat was at stake was a faithful recreation of the truth to the artist of the experience, in the painter’s case the visual experience, the artist being admittedly only one witness, one accomplice during and after the fact.“

He had three distinct ‘periods’: Dublin, London and Algarve. His early work in Dublin, where he used a thin paint surface, has a tense, spare, more-real-than-real quality. In London he became more expressive in his use of paint, applying thick layers of paint, using the brush more and ‘modelling’ the paint surface. In the Algarve he continues this trend into a heavy, broken impasto and some of his late work verges on becoming abstract.

His work comprises portraits, ‘tree portraits’, rural landscapes and urban landscapes. He worked in a variety of media including oils, watercolour, ink, charcoal, lithography and ceramics. It is one of the peculiarities of his methods of working that he seems to have done few, if any, preliminary drawings or studies - works that could be classified as 'studies' are generally complete in themselves and need no reworking into another medium. John Ryan, recalling Swift painting in Dublin, noted how Swift set about painting on canvas; that he went 'straight at it', seemingly 'without any form of preparatory work whatsoever'.

Trees held a special fascination for Swift, particularly the patterns created by their branches, with Swift treating these shapes and patterns in an almost abstract manner. John McGahern has noted that he was fond of the line ‘those particular trees/ that caught you in their mysteries’. His later work is almost entirely composed of ‘tree portraits’ and rural landscapes. It is for his 'intensity of observation' (Theo Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists) that Patrick Swift is perhaps best known. He created compositions of incredible intricacy. Like the neo-romantics before him, nature itself inspired Swift, who effortlessly, it seems, translates into paint the organic and seemingly random twisting vegetative forms. It is not just his technical ability as an artist, but also his talent in creating intricate and complicated compositions that sets Swift firmly in a league of his own.

When writing about art or painting Swift would frequently refer to what he termed ' its mysteries ' : "...the most important factor, the element of mystery...". This element of mystery is clearly evident in his own work, which always seems to have an underlying energy, some unknown quantity; "Its life depends on the degree to which it is inhabited by mystery, speaks to us of the unknown."- Swift

Swift called his painting "making marks" and, with regard to the nature of his work, said:

"Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape....My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in."

Dublin more less

He was educated at Synge Street CBS, a Christian Brothers School in Dublin. Although a self-taught artist he did attend night classes at the National College of Art in 1946 (under Sean Keating), then freelanced in London and briefly attended the Grande Chaumière while in Paris. He later set up his studio on Hatch Street in 1950 (Lucian Freud would share Swift’s studio on his frequent visits to Dublin - Anthony Cronin has recalled finding the two artists in the studio painting a woodcock on a chair). He first exhibited in group shows at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1950 & 51 where his work was singled out by critics. The Dublin Magazine commented on Swift’s exceptional technical ability and

“uncompromising clarity of vision which eschews the accidental or the obvious or the sentimental...[and] shows his power to convey the full impact of the object, as though the spectator were experiencing it for the first time”

In 1952 he held his first solo exhibition at the Waddington Galleries to great acclaim. Time magazine in an article on the exhibition said

Irish critics got a look at the work of a touseled young (25) man named Paddy Swift and tossed their caps in the air. Paddy's 30 canvases are as grey and gloomy as Dublin itself...harshly realistic paintings of dead birds and rabbits, frightened-looking girls and twisted potted plants. Their fascination is in the merciless, sharply etched details, as oppressive and inquiring as a back-room third degree. Dublin Understands. Wrote Critic Tony Gray in the Irish Times: Swift "unearths [from his subjects] not a story, nor a decorative pattern, nor even a mood, but some sort of tension which is a property of their existence." Said the Irish Press: "An almost embarrassing candor . . . Here is a painter who seems to have gone back to the older tradition and to have given the most searching consideration to the composition of his painting." Dublin, which likes authors who write with a shillelagh, understood an artist who painted with one.The Word Is Tension. By 1950, Paddy was in Paris, living in a cheap Left Bank hotel and growing an existentialist beard. He had tackled Paris with £25 in his pockets, but that was soon gone, and he scrabbled a living doing commission portraits of American G.I.s and tourists. "No picture survived this period," he says. "I sold them all to buy food and drink." Nights, he went to the galleries, and there he found what he wanted to do. He liked such old French masters as the 17th century's Nicolas Poussin, the 19th century's Eugene Delacroix, such moderns as Switzerland's Alberto Giacometti and Britain's Francis Bacon. The much-admired decorative style of the Matisses is not for Paddy Swift. "Art," he thinks, "is obviously capable of expressing something more closely related to life than these elegant designs."His main idea is to suggest the tensions he finds in life. "I believe when you bring, say, a plant into a room, everything in that room changes in relation to it. This tension...tension is the only word for it...can be painted."

This is possibly Swift's only interview. Apart from his few statements made during this exhibition it seems Swift never spoke about his art.

A motif of Swift's work at this time was his bird imagery, which appear to have symbolic overtones, and may have even been a subtle form of self-portraiture.

He contributed essays on art and artists he admired (e.g.Nano Reid) to Irish art magazines such as Envoy and The Bell.

Swift formed part of the group of artists and writers that congregated around the Dublin pub, McDaid’s , a group which consisted primarily of those artist involved with Envoy which had its offices nearby at 39 Grafton Street, though most of the journal’s business was conducted in McDaid’s, and included Kavanagh, Cronin (they shared a flat when Swift painted his portrait in 1950), Behan (though Swift & Cronin were later to stop speaking to Behan due, in their view, to Behan’s ill treatment of Kavanagh), Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O’Brien), Pearse Hutchinson, J. P. Donleavy, John Jordan (he and Jordan had been at school together at Synge Street CBS; Swift painted his portrait in the late 40's/ early 50's), et al. During these years he also got to know Samuel Beckett (Becket had an extract from "Watt" appear in Envoy. After his mother's funeral Beckett spent the afternoon alone with Swift, later to be joined by the rowdy Kavanagh. Beckett was later to contribute to Swift´s X Magazine with the first appearance of his L'Image), Edward McGuire (Swift encouraged McGuire to paint and McGuire later acknowledged Swift's influence in his own work) and Patrick Pye (Pye had got lodgings with Swift for a period in Mount Street in 1952 during which time Swift painted his portrait)amongst others. Reginald Gray (Irish artist) writing about this period:

“Back in 1951 when I started painting I rented a studio in Leeson Street . It was a wonderful atmosphere. The painter Neville Johnson had his studio a few doors away and facing me was the studio of the German artist Helmut Mueller. Round the corner in Hatch Street, Patrick Swift was installed and used to let Lucian Freud share his place each time that Freud visited Dublin .”

In Dublin he dated the American poet Claire McAllister.

Following the 1952 exhibition Swift moved to London using it as his base, before a more permanent move there in 1959, with frequent trips to Dublin and stays in France, Italy and the Digswell Arts Trust- then located in Digswell House, a decayed Regency mansion with cottages and outbuildings on the edge of Welwyn Garden City.

Italy more less

Digswell Arts Trust more less

London more less

Algarve more less

On Swift’s Later Work more less

Richard Morphet, Keeper, Tate Britain from 1986 until 1998 (in his introduction to the Swift exhibition at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery in Cork) :

“Although highly acclaimed in critical and artistic circles, the work of the Irish painter Patrick Swift has rarely been publicly exhibited...The vogue at the end of the 50s for abstract painting was not to his taste, nor could he work with academic realism. He sought an expression of life and human creativity which was meaningful and accessible, yet intensely personal, and inspired by emotion, by landscape. It seemed Ireland and England restricted him. Swift emigrated to Portugal in 1962. He later set up a pottery in the Algarve , whose part in the revival of the regional craft has been recognised. Here Swift made a huge contribution to the popularisation of the Algarve , and to the recognition of the beauty of Portugal 's landscape, history and culture...These are some of his most resonant works, where he has found his voice, and in the invigorating new climate the change in his painting was towards an enhanced sensuous warmth, a sense of the integrity of light and a feeling of the integration with nature, of painter and viewer."

Reginald Gray says that “Swift’s work exploded later from the tight coloured drawing technique to a heavy broken impasto, that was not far removed from Van Gogh or Oskar Kokoschka. If Swift’s life had not been cut short I believe he would have surpassed the fame of Lucian Freud. However, in Swift’s own lifetime he never courted fame but I think he deserves it now.” And Falon says: “In a way he almost anticipated the rawness of 1980’s New Expressionism".

There is a remarkable series of late watercolours (until very recently, unknown to all except a few people) which Brian Fallon says are a high point in watercolour painting:

“Almost all are of landscape subjects, or at least outdoor ones. Trees shimmer in the fierce white light, houses or cottages huddle into their fields or gardens, there is an abundant feeling of fertility and also of serenity. Figures are rare, though the human presence is implicit throughout. They have a faint flavour of Cézanne’s late watercolours, but they are bigger and also less formalised, looser and more lyrical. Taken as a sequence they represent one of the peaks of watercolour painting over the last forty years; certainly no Irish painter has done better".

Fernando De Azvedo: “From his early days in Dublin to the end of his life in the Algarve, we can see the very particular and unrivalled persistence of the authentic and inimitable painter in his vision and creative decisions, one which must be seen in its true dimensions- in the unusual path that swift trod- and be clarified by history.”

Swift the Critic and ‘X’ Magazine more less

Porches Pottery more less

When Swift first visited the Algarve in 1962 he discovered a way of life that had changed little since the Middle Ages, a system of commerce and production based around craft activities. However, ‘modernisation’ was fast encroaching and the centuries old craft tradition was dying out. In his book Algarve: A Portrait and a Guide( Images), published in 1965, Swift had noted this decline, saying of the dishes he would insist on using:

 ''All the basic dishes were of the local Lagoa pottery- easily breakable and poorly glazed. But aesthetically pleasing and so cheap that breakages were no tragedy. Replacements after all helped to encourage an industry threatened with extinction. Even now some of the nicer old kitchen objects can no longer be obtained at the pottery. ‘People don’t buy them anymore,’ say the potters, ‘so we’ve stopped making them.’''

Saddened by this decline, Swift was determined to revive this ancient craft and realise his idealistic dream; to prove that the traditional craft-based form of socio-economic production, that had existed throughout Europe until the Industrial revolution, could be successful in the modern world. Swift eventually wanted to have an arts & crafts centre where traditional craftspeople could ply their trade and sell their goods.With the Portuguese artist Lima de Freitas, he set about reviving the local pottery industry. Having contacted local potters, the artists were delighted to discover that the craftsmen could still produce a great variety of forms that had been passed down to them by their ancestors. Incredibly, these pieces conformed exactly to those they had previously only seen in museums, possessing the simple strength of ancient pots relating to the oldest Iberian civilizations. The two artists began to research the designs and motifs of ancient pottery, visiting museums throughout Europe, until finally some basic patterns began to emerge as being typical of the influences imposed by past civilisations that had once dominated the Algarve. These designs include the various animals, flowers and foliage that have become associated with Porches Pottery., having compiled a series of patterns the decorators at the pottery would work from, forbade slavish copying, instead, insisting upon free flowing painting within the established style, which is a fundamental characteristic of Porches Pottery decoration.

As Porches Pottery continues to be a successful pottery we can say that Swift's dream - at least with his pottery- was realised.

At Porches Pottery he produced many tile panels and portraits on plates. He also developed a technique of carving wet cement to produce reliefs with intricate patterns, shapes and figures. The café at Porches, Bar Bacchus, is decorated with magnificent tile panels painted by Swift. There is also an outside eating area decorated with tiles designed by Swift’s late daughter, Katherine Swift, who managed the pottery following her father's death and was later to leave the fold and found Estudio Destra in Silves.

A Reluctance to Exhibit more less

"The Art of painting is itself an intensely personal activitya picture is a unique and private event in the life of the painter: an object made alone with a man and a blank canvas." - Swift

"A real painting...is something which happens in life not in art." - Swift

During his career Swift only held two solo exhibitions: Dublin in 1952 and Lisbon in 1974

After his first, highly acclaimed solo exhibition (how many artists have an article appear in Time magazine following their first solo exhibition?), Swift showed no desire in exhibiting again until 1974, when he was persuaded to hold an exhibition in Lisbon - the venue being the deciding factor for Swift. David Wright has suggested that perhaps some trauma was suffered at his first showing, and it has been noted that much of Swift's early work has an underlying tone of disquiet. We know he distrusted publicity and celebrity, which he disliked and considered a distraction, and the success of his first exhibition would certainly have attracted unwanted attention. It also seems that, aside from his few statement made during the Dublin exhibition, he never spoke about his art since, not even with those he was intimate with- which may add weight to Wright´s suggestion of some trauma having been suffered. However, as Swift was firmly of the opinion that the work should speak for itself, even if plainly uninterested is showing his own, we shouldn't read too much into his silence with regards to his work. His only other statements about art are in his general essays on art and thoughts he would jot down in his notebook- which rarely refer to his own art. Swift, something of an idealist, had a very definite idea of what being an Artist meant - for him at least - and would have had an inherent dislike and distrust of publicity - a stance he shared with many artists of that period. His experiences at the Dublin exhibition seem to have cemented this general disposition. It´s also possible that, as he seems to have had a deep attachment to his work - you could almost say spiritual attachment - and being a romantic at heart (John McGahern recalled Swift saying "it would be absurd to be anything but a romantic in this conformist age"), he may have been affected by having to sell all his work in Paris: "No picture survived this period," he says. "I sold them all to buy food and drink." Yet, by all accounts, though an emotional and spiritual person, he was not a sentimental man. It's probable that his idealism and attachment to his work simply meant that he could never have been comfortable with the commercial aspects of selling art. Whatever the reasons, Swift’s art seems to have been a very personal and private matter carried out behind closed doors- very few were allowed into his studio in the Algarve. Most of Swift’s output during his life was seen -if at all- by a very small number of people that he was intimate with. Brian Fallon says that ‘ this is the typical Irish artist-intellectual of the post-war years, reared on Joyce and Baudelaire, introspective, cerebral, at once cynical and idealistic, at odds with much or most of what the society around him believed in or affected to believe in’, and Aidan Dunne simply that Swift was a man who " appears to have wanted nothing more than to be allowed to be himself ".

If Swift was a private man (so much so that Lima de Freitas says he was unaware of Swifts life and involvement in the arts in Dublin & London ) he was certainly not a reclusive type. His hospitality and generosity were legendary. The house he built in the Algarve, where he would entertain most nights, was covered in his paintings. He would sometimes give his work away- and occasionally sell- to people he knew well. As his temperamental tendency was also only to paint those whom he knew well , perhaps it is simply as John Ryan says, that ' he painted the trees and gardens he cherished and the people he loved '. Swift, according to those closest to him, was happy just to be painting. Anthony Cronin believes that in painting the Algarve trees, “in the contemplation and re-creation of these woody, self-supporting stems and trunks with their abundant leafage he found a happiness which was not dependent on human response or the satisfactions of ambition.” Cronin has also noted that Swift was enamoured with a certain idea of success and that, in a sense, Swift doesn't need to be proven a success as he always was a success, something that people who met him sensed immediately. Swift was certainly aware of the validity of what he was doing. And it must be remembered that Swift's life was unexpectedly cut short, when he was at the peak of his powers. It may be that he had internally decided on a return to exhibiting- it has been said that he had expressed a desire for setting up a studio in Wicklow, Ireland, and showing his work there. His last -unfinished- painting is a portrait of an elderly couple with a baby set in the Wicklow mountains.

Posthumous more less

Swift’s death in 1983 went unnoticed. A few years after his death John Ryan started gathering information for a book to commemorate Swift's life. Sadly, Ryan, who had been suffering from ill health for many years, passed away in 1992 before he could complete his commemorative book. Some time in the mid 1980’s Veronica Jane O’Mara came across a painting by Swift. Nobody she asked knew anything about the artist and neither could she find any information on Swift in the various books on Irish art. Veronica eventually undertook her own research which ended with her completing the book that Ryan had started. 'Psof course' (a fine book but with a limited run and a peculiar choice of title that Swift's widow was reportedly against) was published in 1993 to coincide with the IMMA retrospective exhibition. As this book had a limited run it would be hoped that another, more affordable, book on Swift were to be published, one with his basic biographical details, his essays, images of his work - particularly images of his work- and contributions from fellow artists - without unnecessary conjecture regarding what may or may not have amused the artist etc.- so that at least art students etc. who may have an interest in the artist could have the information to hand. The 1993 IMMA Retrospective was highly acclaimed by critics and artists alike. At this point it seemed that Swift might have earned his place as a major figure of twentieth century Irish art. Today, however, for reasons that can have little to do with the quality of his work, Swift is still largely overlooked and now has the unenviable reputation of being considered by many to be the most underrated, and under-celebrated, Irish artist. His work has been shown since 1993 but largely ignored. In 2002 the Department of Foreign Affairs (who also awarded Swift the grant to study in Italy) sponsored the 'Patrick Swift: An Irish Artist In Portugal' exhibitions that were held at the Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork, and Palacio Foz in Lisbon. In 2004 Swifts work appeared on the BBC Antiques Roadshow ( Rotherham Roadshow, Sunday 3rd Oct, 2004, Image), where the BBC art critic, Stephen Somerville, was highly praising of his work, saying simply of a London tree painting: "I love it". This is of interest because it illustrates how uncharted much of Swift’s career still is. The lady who brought Swifts work (work which was unknown) along to the Roadshow has numerous paintings and watercolours (some 33 botanical studies of fungi painted in Ashwell) by Swift- her father having been a sort of patron of Swift’s. In 2005 the Office of Public Works, Dublin, held an exhibition of paintings, drawings and watercolours by Swift. His portrait of Patrick Kavanagh (a portrait that most certainly deserves to be on permanent public display) recently toured as part of the ‘CIE: Art On The Move’ exhibitions to much acclaim.

Legacy more less

Swift Quotes more less

My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.

Picturemaking is ludicrous in light of the awful times we must endure.

To paint even a bottle is dramatic. A leaf will do.

To know what it is to look at things, life as a prayer, a mass, a celebration.

the most important factor, the element of mystery

A real painting is something which happens to the painter once in a given minute; it is unique in that it will never happen again and in this sense is an impossible object. It is judged by the painter simply as a success or failure without qualification. And it is something which happens in life not in art.

The Art of painting is itself an intensely personal activitya picture is a unique and private event in the life of the painter: an object made alone with a man and a blank canvas.

Its life depends on the degree to which it is inhabited by mystery, speaks to us of the unknown

[Art] speaks to us of resignation and rejoicing in reality, and does so through a transformation of our experience of the world into an order wherein all facts become joyous; the more terrible the material the greater the the artistic triumph...It is a transformation that is mysterious, personal and ethical...For it is always the reality of the particular that provides the occasion and the spring of art- it is always "those particular trees/ That caught you in their mysteries" or the experience of some loved object. Not that the matter rests here. It is the transcendent imagination working on this material that releases the mysterious energies which move and speak of deepest existence.

Swift on Caravaggio: " It is in the fact that no detail is unworthy of his love that affects us deeply, in painting the gesture in full rhetorical flower, he is at the same time in love with the very simple existence of the object apart from its significance in action."

...It would be phony, however, to pretend too great a concern for the effects of the system of selling pictures on the character of contemporary painters. It is very likely unhealthy and occasionally disastrous even to some people of real talent. Yet the nature of art is so strange, so unpredictable, and the circumstances of its production so remote from the world of commerce that it would appear the truth is less alarming than the facts might lead one to suppose. It is possible that the occasions of corruption being so frequent the flowering of genuine vision is all the more intense, the more purified, and consequently more valuable than ever.

The ethics of art are terrifying because real art by increasing our knowledge of ourselves increases in exactly the same proportion the ethical commitment.

Not to paint is the highest ambition of the painter but God who gives the gift requires that it be honoured. It is in the gesture that it lives. There is no escape. Picturemaking is ludicrous in the light of the awful times we must endure. It is sufficient to contemplate the nature of composition to see that the picture itself is impossible... My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.

The only indication of an individual vision is an individual style.

The interesting thing is what happens in the specific picture: its precision in terms of the sensations it produces- the illusion it creates and the effect of this illusion on the psychology opposed to it... General philosophical and technical information however interesting in itself is secondary to this reality.

Encountering a work of art is in many respects rather like meeting a person. One may not recognise his quality at first, may be put off by a surface aspect and find out later he is quite different etc.

The old saying, ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you’, expresses the opposite idea to that which animates the painter before his canvas. It is precisely what he does not know which may destroy him.

Metaphysics- what metaphysics do those trees have?

Those painters who to-day work under the banner or label of the Modern, the Progressive, can hardly accuse the public of not taking notice.

For to be contemporary is not necessarily to be part of any movement, to be included in the official representations of national and international art. History shows that it may well be the opposite. It may be that it is the odd, the personal, the curious, the simply honest, that at this moment, when everyone looks to the extreme and flamboyant, constitutes the most interesting manifestation of the spirit of art.

Obey God- live life spontaneously.

Bibliography more less

Veronica Jane O’Mara (ed.), PS...of course- Patrick Swift 1927-83 (ISBN 0-946641-37-4) , with contributions on Swift by George Barker, Anthony Cronin, Lima de Freitas , Patrick Kavanagh, John McGahern, John Ryan, Brian Higgins, CH Sission, Katherine Swift, David Wright (Gandon Editions, Kinsale, 1993)
An Anthology from X, selected by David Wright (Oxford University Press 1988; ISBN 0-19-212266-5)
Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1993, catalogue (ISBN 1-873654-12-X ). Essay on Swift by Anthony Cronin (poet) and Aidan Dunne (art critic).
An Irish Painter in Portugal, 2001, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery (ISBN 0-946846-75-8). Includes essays on Swift by Fernando de Azvedo (painter and President of Sociadede de Bellas Artes, Lisbon), Brian Fallon´s (art critic to the Irish Times for 35 years) Patrick Swift and Irish art(written in 1993 but omitted from the book on Swift published that year) and Peter Murray (Director Crawford Gallery, Cork)
Dictionary of Irish Artists (2002), Theo Snoddy, p. 640, Merlin Publishing, Dublin.
X, Volume 1 Numbers 1-4, November 1959-October 1960, Barrie & Rockliff 1961, limited to 800 copies, Hardcover. With contributions by Samuel Beckett, George Barker, David Gascoyne, Robert Graves, Patrick Kavanagh, Hugh Macdiarmid, Ezra Pound & others, with reproductions of paintings by Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, David Bomberg, Alberto Giacometti & others.
Patrick Swift and David Wright produced three books on Portugal, all illustrated by Swift: Algarve, A Portrait and a Guide (Barrie & Rockliff, London 1965); Minho, A Portrait and a Guide (Barrie & Rockliff, London 1968); Lisbon, A Portrait and a Guide (Barrie & Rockliff, London 1971).More Info:[1]
Randolph Cary, (A Guide to) Birds of Southern Portugal , illustrated by Swift (Barrie & Rockliff, London, 1973). Randolph Cary had previously contributed a chapter on birds for Swift's Algarve: Portrait And A Guide, 1965, also Barrie & Rockliff.
Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, by Antoinette Quinn (Author), Gill & Macmillan Ltd; 2nd Revised edition (Sep 2003), ISBN 0-7171-3643-4, ISBN 978-0-7171-3643-8.
Flann O’Brien [Brian O'Nolan] The Hard Life; German edition, Das harte Leben, illustrated by Patrick Swift ( Nannen-Verlag , Hamburg )
Love Of The World, John McGahern, Essays , Edited by Stanley van der Ziel,2009: "The Bird Swift" by McGahern.
My Love to the Beaks and Tails, by Annie Sise. Readers Union, 1976 (ISBN 0-575-01955-7) . Illustrations by Swift
John Ryan, Remembering How We Stood, (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1975).
Envoy, 1951 July, vol 5/20, John Ryan on Patrick Swift.
Anthony Cronin, Dead as Doornails, (Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1976)
CH Sission, On the Look-out (Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1989).
Collected Poems, C.H. Sission, Carcanet Press Ltd; 2nd Revised edition edition (27 Aug 1998), Language English , ISBN 1-85754-379-3, ISBN 978-1-85754-379-7. Includes poem about Swift.
Selected Poems, David Wright, Carcanet Press Ltd (1 July 1988), ISBN 0-85635-753-7, ISBN 978-0-85635-753-4. Includes the poem “Images for a Painter” about Swift.
Daniel Farson, Soho in the Fifties (Michael Joseph, London, 1987).
David Gascoyne (ed.), The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Smart (Paladin, London, 1992).
Rosemary Sullivan, By Heart -The Life of Elizabeth Smart (Flamingo, London, 1992).
A Patrick Kavanagh Anthology, Platt, Eugene Robert, Ed., Commedia Publishing Co., Dublin, 1973. Includes illustration of Kavanagh by Swift.
Martello Spring 1984, Maureen Charlton & John Stafford, Blackrock: Ardmore Records, 1984. Illustrated with 6 coloured plates by Irish artist Walter Osborne, Patrick Swift & R.B. Beechey.
The Canterbury tales / translated into modern English prose by David Wright; endpapers by Patrick Swift. London, Harris,1964.
Selected Poems , HOMAGE TO GEORGE BARKER (On his Sixtieth Birthday). John Heath-Stubbs & Martin Green, -eds, 1973, Martin Brian & O'Keefe Ltd. Includes portrait of Barker by Swift and Swift's essay on Barker, Prolegomenon to George Barker(ISBN 0856161299; ISBN 0-85616-200-0).
Nano Reid, by Patrick Swift, Envoy, A Review of Literature and Art, March 1950.

Search - List of Books by Patrick Swift

Style more less

Dublin more less

Italy more less

Digswell Arts Trust more less

London more less

Algarve more less

On Swift’s Later Work more less

Swift the Critic and ‘X’ Magazine more less

Porches Pottery more less

A Reluctance to Exhibit more less

Posthumous more less

Legacy more less

Swift Quotes more less

Bibliography more less

Solo Exhibitions more less

Group Exhibitions more less

Collections more less

Essays By Swift more less

Further Reading more less

Search - List of Books by Patrick Swift

Style more less

Dublin more less

Italy more less

Digswell Arts Trust more less

London more less

Algarve more less

On Swift’s Later Work more less

Swift the Critic and ‘X’ Magazine more less

Porches Pottery more less

A Reluctance to Exhibit more less

Posthumous more less

Legacy more less

Swift Quotes more less

Bibliography more less

Solo Exhibitions more less

Group Exhibitions more less

Collections more less

Essays By Swift more less

Further Reading more less

Loading...