The “Inscapes” of Louis le Brocquy Karen E. Brown For me, as perhaps for our Celtic and Gallic ancestors, the human head can be re- garded ambivalently as a box which holds the spirit prisoner, but which may also free it transparently within the face. Paradoxically, as we know, the face is at once a mask which hides the spirit and a revelation, an incarnation of this spirit. (le Brocquy, “Notes,” qtd. in Walker, 147) In 1964, painter and illustrator Louis le Brocquy (b. Dublin, 1916) “discovered” Polynesian ancestral skulls displayed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. The skulls are over-modelled in clay often with cowrie shells inserted for eyes, and the artist described them as being “painted ritualistically to contain the spirit” (le Brocquy, The Head Image 7, 22). A year afterwards le Brocquy drew an analogy between them and the head-cult of Celto-Ligurian origin which had been practiced near Aix-en-Provence, in Irish mythology such as the story of The Taín, and in archaeological sites such as the carved portal heads at Dysert O’Dea (le Brocquy, The Head Image 22; Walker 51; Kinsella).1 From 1968, the artist developed the head image in book illustration, tapestries, and “studies towards” portraits of leading Irish literary and cultural figures including W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), James Joyce (1882–1941), and Samuel Beckett (1906–89; figs. 1–3). My response to these head images has led me to refer to them in the title of this essay as “inscapes.” This was a term used by the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)2 which resonates with le Brocquy’s “revelations” encapsulated in the quotation above. In his writings le Brocquy frequently uses metaphors derived from landscape and archaeology to describe the conception of his head images. For example, “As I conceive it, there lies behind the face an interior landscape which the painter tries to discover” (le Brocquy, “Notes,” qtd. in Walker, 147), and, “I think of the painter as a kind of archaeologist, … patiently disturbing the surface of things” (le Brocquy, The Head Image 24). In works such as figs. 1–3 these concepts are rich: each of the faces is rendered in oils on a white canvas background, and paint is applied with flicks and jabs, the brush often loaded with several bright colors. Interestingly, in a discussion about his landscape paintings in watercolor, le Brocquy stated that he had painted more head images in watercolor than in 100 Karen E. Brown Fig. 1. Louis le Brocquy (b. 1916), Image of William Butler Yeats, 1994. Oil on canvas, 93 x 73 cm. Cork: Crawford Municipal Art Gallery. © The artist. Courtesy of Pierre le Brocquy. oils, and that this experience had helped him to “release” his oil paintings (le Brocquy, The Irish Landscape 10). In a work such as Image of William Butler Yeats (1994; fig. 1) this “release” is apparent in the brush strokes around the contours of the face, in lost and found edges around the sides of the face, and in the areas of thick impasto which add a third dimension to the image. Art historians, critics, and poets including Anne Crookshank, Dorothy Walker, Anne Madden, Seamus Heaney, and John Montague have written eloquently about the artist’s head images.3 However, in the light of recent .