Patrick Swift

Patrick Swift
Patrick Swift, Algarve studio, by Tim Motion, 1978
Born	12 August 1927(1927-08-12) Dublin, Ireland
Died	19 July 1983(1983-07-19) (aged 55) Algarve, Portugal
Nationality	Irish
Field	Painting, Ceramics, Criticism, Poetry, Literature
Website	http://painterpatrickswift.blogspot.com/

Patrick Swift (Dublin 1927 – Algarve 1983) was an Irish-born Portuguese painter, writer and ceramicist who lived in Dublin, London and Algarve in southern Portugal, where he is buried in the town of Porches. He used the pseudonym James Mahon for some of his writing.

Overview

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 and Brendan Behan. In London he moved into the Soho bohemia which included George Barker, Elizabeth Smart et al. and with the poet David Wright founded and co-edited X magazine which Swift used to champion artists such as Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and David Bomberg (whose posthumous papers he unearthed & edited). In Portugal he continued painting while also writing and illustrating books on Portugal and founding Porches Pottery, which revived a dying industry.

During his lifetime 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. For most of his career he showed little interest in exhibiting his work.^[1] In 1993 the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) held a retrospective of Swift's work.

Work

Forget-me-Knots on a Cane Table , Patrick Swift, 1950-52

A view through trees, Patrick Swift, 1950s

Claire McAlister with blue thistles, by Patrick Swift, 1951

He was a figurative painter. (Aidan Dunne: "He was a representational artist through and through...Fidelity to visual experience above all."^[2]) 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.^[3] Anthony Cronin (who was close to Swift for many years): “He was never in any doubt that 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 description…What 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. Of course this faithfulness did not rule out expressionist overtones. The truth was doubtless subjective as well as objective. Swift's blues and greys were usually properties of what he was painting. They were also part of his vision of things, properties of his mind. We felt then that time could only find its full expression through an art that was frugal, ascetic, puritanical even...In faraway Paris, Samuel Beckett felt the same thing, writing the trilogy that was to give asceticism, frugality, puritanisim and the bitter humour that lies at the heart of the joke that is life, their full expression. Swift's avoidance of warm colours... was born in that time and afterwards harked back to it.“^[4]

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 (founder of Envoy) in his introduction to Swift for the Rosc catalogue 1971 (which included Swift's portrait of Kavanagh): "'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";^[5] and in Envoy (1951): "He paints what he sees."^[6]

He had three distinct "periods": Dublin, London, and Algarve. ^[7] His work comprises portraits, "tree portraits" (trees held a special fascination for Swift^[8]), rural landscapes and urban landscapes. He worked in a variety of media including oils, watercolour, ink, charcoal, lithography and ceramics. One of the peculiarities of his methods of working is 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.^[9]

Swift regarded painting as “a deeply personal and private activity".^[10] As The Irish Times noted in 1952, his work is “intensely personal and strangely disturbing”.^[11] When writing about art he would frequently refer to what he termed "its mysteries". ^[12] Swift called his painting "making marks", "a way of passing the time",^[13] and, with regard to the nature of his work, wrote: "My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in."^[14]

Dublin

He was educated at Synge Street CBS, a Christian Brothers School in Dublin. Although a self-taught^[15] artist he did attend night classes at the National College of Art in 1946 & 48 (under Sean Keating), freelanced in London in the late 1940s and attended the Grande Chaumière in Paris (where he met Giacometti) in the summer of 1950. In the late 1940s he had a studio on Baggot Street^[16] and from 1950-52 Swift set up his studio on Hatch Street. During this period he shared his board with his then girlfriend, the American poet Claire McAllister, Anthony Cronin, John S. Beckett (cousin to Samuel), and briefly with Patrick Pye (Swift painted his portrait in 1952). Lucian Freud was a frequent visitor to Dublin^[17] -his visits coinciding with the courtship of Lady Caroline Blackwood- and would share Swift’s studio. He first exhibited professionally in group shows at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1950 & 51 where his work was singled out by critics.^[18] The Dublin Magazine commented on Swift’s "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. Time magazine in an article on the exhibition:^[19]

Self-portrait with dead woodcock (double self-portrait?^[20]), Patrick Swift, c.1951

"Irish critics got a look at the work of a tousled 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... 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 Eugène 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 may have been Swift's only ever interview. A motif of his 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.^[21] From early on he was involved with literary magazines,^[22] such as The Bell and Envoy, and contributed the occasional critical piece on art and artists he admired (e.g.Nano Reid,^[23] who painted Swift's portrait in 1950). He formed part of the group of artists and writers who were involved with Envoy (much of the journal’s business was conducted in McDaid’s^[24]) that included Kavanagh (at least three portraits), Cronin (at least two portraits), Behan,^[25] Brian O'Nolan (Swift illustrated Heinrich Böll's German translation of The Hard Life), Pearse Hutchinson (Synge Street CBS) and John Jordan (Synge Street CBS; two portraits). During these years he also got to know Samuel Beckett^[26] (possibly one portrait;^[27] 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^[28]), and Daniel Farson among others.^[29] Following the Waddington exhibition Swift moved to London in November 1952, using it as his base, with occasional trips to Dublin and stays in France, Italy, Oakridge and the Digswell Arts Trust.

Italy, Oakridge & Digswell Arts Trust

Oonagh Swift in Rome, 1954/5, by Patrick Swift

In 1954 he was awarded a grant by the Irish Cultural Relations Committee to study art in Italy. He was accompanied by his future wife, Oonagh Ryan (sister of the artist John Ryan and the Irish actress Kathleen Ryan; formerly married to Alexis Guedroitz with whom she had a daughter, Ania Guédroïtz). In Italy he painted, studied and wrote essays on art. Following his year in Italy Swift returned to Dublin (via Paris and London), for Christmas 1955, where Oonagh wanted to be for the birth of their first child, Katherine Swift. He then returned to London in 1956 and accepted Elizabeth Smart's offer to share Winstone Cottage (then owned by John Rothenstein), which contained a studio, in Oakridge, Gloucestershire. Peggy Guggenheim, whom he had befriended in Venice, visited the Swifts in Oakridge. From October 1958 to 1959 he spent time at Digswell Arts Trust, then located at Digswell House, a decayed Regency mansion with cottages and outbuildings on the edge of Welwyn Garden City. Swift came to Digswell through the visionary educator Henry Morris. The first artists arrived in 1957 and Swift took up residency a year later (for a period sharing a studio with Michael Andrews). During his residency at Digswell he painted many views of Ashwell and its Springs, one of which was presented by Henry Morris to Melbourn Village College at its opening in 1959, but Swift had already left, leaving Lady Mountbatten, who was the chief guest at the opening, to remarked as she received the painting that its creator was at that moment in a taxi heading for London.

London

Swift was familiar with London and its literary and artistic circles by the early 1950s: he had freelanced in London in the late 1940s;^[30] in the early fifties he would occasionally stay with Freud in London; in 1953 he shared a flat with Anthony Cronin in Camden but actually used it as his studio, staying instead with Oonagh Ryan in Hampstead - it was at this point that Swift and Wright first discussed the idea of creating a new literary magazine, a quarterly which would publish writing on artistic issues they felt to be of importance; 1957-58 he had a flat and studio at 39 Eccleston Square; from 1959-62 he lived at 9 Westbourne Terrace (Elizabeth Smart lived upstairs), and it was during this period that he founded X magazine

Patrick Kavanagh, by Patrick Swift, 1960

In London his work grew more expressive. Brian Fallon (chief arts critic to The Irish Times for 35 years) in his essay "Patrick Swift And Irish Art": "In London his style changed, not immediately, but gradually and very thoroughly. In fact, it was less a stylistic change than a transformation. From being a painter with sharp, angular lines and a thin paint surface, he became one who ‘drew with the brush’. Modelled in heavy, laden strokes, and in general, daubed and dragged the paint around until it did his bidding. Stylistically, his ‘first period’ and ‘second period’ could hardly be more different from one another, though the underlying sensibility somehow remains."^[31]

London portraits include the poets George Barker, Patrick Kavanagh, David Wright (two portraits), Brian Higgins, John Heath-Stubbs, Paul Potts, C. H. Sisson and David Gascoyne (there may be others, e.g. Dom Moraes^[32]). At the time Swift was sometimes referred to as the "poets' painter" - many of his close friends were poets and they seem to have regarded him as "their" painter. Wanda Ryan Smolin (art historian and writer) writing in the Irish Arts Review, 1994, says one thing that distinguishes Swift is "his ability to communicate certain truths on what one senses to be a deeply spiritual level. It is perhaps this quality in his work which links Swift with the world of poetry and poets. Apart from close family members, poets were almost exclusively subjects of his portraits"^[33] Fallon says, "once again, his approach was basically humanist, not formalist", and that these London portraits, "are among the finest portraits painted in Britain at this period...Yet they were seen by only a handful of people, and in some cases were even lucky to have survived."^[34] Fallon also notes that the Kavanagh and Wright portraits are close to Expressionism. On Swift's London tree paintings, Aidan Dunne says, "many paintings zoom in on their motif itself delighting in the hectic rhythms established by the orderly but profuse curvilinear sweep of the branches. Even earlier studies of back gardens reveal him to be drawn to the abstract qualities of the tangled stems and foliage."^[4] While in London he associated with many leading artists,^[35] writers and poets of the day with the flat at 9 Westbourne Terrace becoming a "mini-Soho".^[36] In 1962, before the final number of X was published, Swift left London for an extended trip to southern Europe.

Algarve

Algarve Olive Tree, Patrick Swift

Algarve Harvester 'Blind Luis', by Patrick Swift

X, Vol.II, No.I, March 1961

Self-portrait, 1950-2

Hatch Street Studio

Swift’s travels led him to the small fishing village - as it was then - of Carvoeiro in the Algarve. He was so enchanted with the place that he remained. In Algarve he painted, wrote and illustrated books on Portugal and founded Porches Pottery (Olaria Algarve). He designed the building that houses Porches Pottery (which the Portuguese government once listed) to resemble a 17C farmhouse, along with several other buildings^[37] Though Swift had voluntarily removed himself from the art world (he had effectively done so, at least as an exhibiting painter involved with the art establishment, following his 1952 solo exhibition) he did make new artistic friendships in the Algarve, such as Norah McGuinness (who holidayed in Algarve), Jacques d'Arribehaude and Lima de Freitas. He exhibited: drawings for Algarve: a portrait and a guide at the Diário de Notícias Gallery (Portuguese national newspaper), Lisbon, 1965; an exhibition of his pottery at the Galeria Diário de Notícias Gallery, Lisbon, 1970; an exhibition of his paintings at Galeria S Mamede, Lisbon, 1974. He designed the sets for The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Portuguese National Theatre Company, Lisbon, 1977. Swift lived and worked in the Algarve from 1962 until his premature death, from an inoperable brain tumour, in 1983. His work from this period includes portraits of his friend Francisco de Sá Carneiro (who commissioned Swift to paint his portrait when he was elected Prime Minister in 1980) and his partner, Snu Abecassis (Danish-born journalist and editor who founded the Portuguese publishing house, Publicações Dom Quixote), both of whom died in a plane crash in 1980. Swift is buried in the Igreja Matriz church in Porches, for which he designed the stations of the cross.

Criticism & X Magazine

In Dublin and London he partook of artistic and, always, literary life,^[38] and from early on was involved with literary magazines. In London he founded and edited, with the poet David Wright, X magazine for which he contributed articles under the pseudonym "James Mahon" (Swift's mother was a Mahon from Co. Wicklow). David Wright (in his introduction to An Anthology from X): "The true begetter and leading light of X was Patrick Swift... Swift was, of course, responsible for the art side of the magazine. These were the boom years of abstract art. Swift, twenty years ahead of his time... promoting the work of then unknown or unfashionable figurative painters, among them the young Frank Auerbach, Michael Andrews, and Craigie Aitchison, and such as-yet uncannonized painters as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and the forgotten David Bomberg. Examples of their work were reproduced; more importantly, it was Swift's idea that the artist should speak for themselves, which was achieved either by transcribing their tape-recorded conversation... or by publishing their notes. Swift’s unearthing and editing of David Bomberg’s outspoken and apocalyptic pensées, scattered about his miscellaneous papers, was an outstanding contribution."^[39] "To say nothing of the continentals like Kokoschka, Giacometti, André Masson... Nor was he any less active on the literary side of the magazine. Here Swift and I worked in perfect harmony".^[40] Wright regarding Swift promoting his own work: "Swift and Cronin... brought me to the attention of the publisher Derek Verschoyle - and this was typical of Swift, who would take immense pains to push the product of anybody whose work he believed in, yet never bothered to promote his own."^[40] Martin Green: "It was he, together with Tony Cronin, who initially put up the idea of bringing together Kavanagh's poems for the Collected Poems… Paddy Swift had a catalytic enthusiasm that ignited a response elsewhere. I remember being introduced by him to John McGahern [who was first published in X magazine^[41]]… which I recommended for publication but was overruled... It was he who brought to my attention the Charles Sisson version of Catullus, which I subsequently published… It was he who helped to find a publisher for Brian Higgins..."^[40]

Patrick Kavanagh: Swift believed in Kavanagh and promoted him. John Ryan: "Swift, in fact, made a decided impact on Kavanagh. It is hard to believe now that it was mainly a cultural impact and that he actually changed the older man`s entire approach to poetry."^[42] Swift was responsible for Kavanagh appearing in Nimbus in 1956.^[43] Antoinette Quinn (Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography) says, "publication there [In Nimbus] was to prove a turning point… The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was to be directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus, and his Collected Poems^[44](1964)"^[45] Regarding their friendship, Antoinette Quinn says, "Swift believed in his genius and indulged him and... the older man... came to lean on Swift as a beloved nephew."^[46] Kavanagh would often stay with Swift and his family at 9 Westbourne Terrace.^[47]

Brian Fallon: "X, a remarkable publication which, in some respects, was light years ahead of its time... Swift's criticism is that of the practicing artist not that of a practicing critic, and when speaking of his criticism I do not merely mean only his occasional critical essays, but his activity as co-editor of a magazine and as champion of Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, Craigie Aitchison, Nano Reid, Giacometti and David Bomberg (whose posthumous papers he edited). This is criticism in the valid, active , propagandistic sense, not merely the daily or weekly grind of reviewing all sorts and conditions of artists, good and bad, but mostly mediocre. Once again much of Swift's activity in this field was semi-underground, almost subversive, often done in the teeth of the modernist establishment of his day. His record in this field speaks for itself... I cannot think of any other Irish painter who achieved anything like what he did as a critic and editor and discoverer of talent, and very few painters in any other country either. Wyndham Lewis, it is true, was a verbose propagandist, but on the whole he was a bad critic, and somehow his propaganda almost always turns out to be some form of self-aggrandisement, whereas Swift almost always pushed the fortunes and reputations of his friends and almost never his own. Yet, you do not get, from his general stance, that his motives were simply friendship and good intentions. There is a tone of dedication throughout, as though he was serving art, and not merely artists... It is a peculiarity of his very individual psyche and personality that Swift cannot be ‘placed’ purely as a painter. He was an artist in the broad sense before he was specifically a painter, and his context embraces literature and other disciplines besides painting or drawing (It is noticeable that he had more friends who were literary men than friends who were painters). Swift is not a painter’s painter, he is an artist’s artist, a man whose mentality overlapped into other fields besides his own chosen one."^[48]

Posthumous

In 1993 Gandon Editions published a biography^[49] of Swift, with contributions by his friends, to coincide with the IMMA Retrospective, when his work was brought back to Dublin. The 1993 IMMA Retrospective was acclaimed by critics and artists alike^[50] with many critics commentating on the "intimate" and "personal" nature of his work. 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 Swift's work (a painting of Eccleston Square as seen from his studio and botanical studies of fungi painted in Ashwell) appeared on the BBC Antiques Roadshow^[51] where the BBC art expert, Stephen Somerville, was highly praising of his work, saying simply of a London tree painting, "I love it". 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 should be on public display) forms part of the CIÉ (Irish state transport authority) collection and recently toured as part of the "CIE: Art On The Move" exhibitions to much acclaim. Two pictures by Swift, from IMMA's permanent collection, Forget-me-[K]nots on a Cane Table & London Self-Portrait, were exhibited in "The Moderns" exhibition, IMMA, October 2010- Feb 2011.

Swift quotes

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Patrick Swift

The following are a selection of quotations by Swift taken from his Portuguese Notes (Gandon Editions Biography):^[52]

• 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. Picture-making 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. Each square inch of Titian contains the whole pointless- between the cradle and the grave. My paintings are merely signs that the activity was engaged in.

• 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.

• One who opens his eyes and sees. To be good at seeing. How difficult not to see anything but the visible. And nothing will be left but dust and manure. Attempting the impossible. Approach the mystery.

• Metaphysics- what metaphysics do those trees have?

• What trace of the creature subsists in the work. It is a way of staying alone, passing the time subjected to the object - silent, still. Walk with humility in the landscape. To be some natural thing - an ancient tree - no thinking - not to think is central to the activity.

• Life is more important than art- quantity is only important in that the amount of activity is greater not the number of works.

• Obey God by living spontaneously.

Bibliography

• Patrick Swift 1927-83 - PS...of course (ISBN 0-946641-37-4), Veronica O'Mara (ed.), with contributions by George Barker, Anthony Cronin, Lima de Freitas, Patrick Kavanagh, John McGahern, John Ryan, Brian Higgins, C. H. Sisson, Katherine Swift, David Wright, Martin Green (author), and Jacques d'Arribehaude (Gandon Editions, Kinsale, 1993)
• An Anthology from X, selected by David Wright (Oxford University Press 1988; ISBN 0-19-212266-5)
• Patrick Swift 1927-83, Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1993 Retrospective Catalogue (ISBN 1-873654-12-X ); essays on Swift by Anthony Cronin (poet) and Aidan Dunne (art critic).
• An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001 (ISBN 0-946846-75-8); includes essays by Fernando de Azvedo (painter and President of Sociedade de Bellas Artes, Lisbon), Peter Murray (Director Crawford Gallery, Cork) and Brian Fallon's "Patrick Swift and Irish art".
• Dictionary of Irish Artists, Theo Snoddy, p. 640, Merlin Publishing, Dublin, 2002.
• X, Volume 1, Numbers 1-4, November 1959-October 1960, Barrie & Rockliff, 1961, limited to 800 copies, hardcover; 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.
• The Moderns, IMMA, Irish artists and writers- the development of modern Ireland through its arts in the period from the 1900s to 1970s, 2011, ISBN 978-1-907020-49-0.
• Paintings by Patrick Swift at the Victor Waddington Galleries, 8 South Anne Street, Dublin, Catalogue, 1952 (copy held at the National Library of Ireland).
• 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).
• (A Guide to) Birds of Southern Portugal, Randolph Cary (Barrie & Rockliff, London, 1973); illustrated by Swift; Randolph Cary had previously contributed a chapter on birds for Swift's Algarve: a portrait and a guide, 1965.
• Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, Antoinette Quinn (Author), Gill & Macmillan Ltd. (Sep 2003), ISBN 0-7171-3643-4, ISBN 978-0-7171-3643-8.
• The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker, Robert Fraser (Jonathan Cape, 2001)
• Das harte Leben, Heinrich Böll's German translation of Flann O’Brien's The Hard Life, German edition, 1966; illustrated by Swift.
• Love Of The World, John McGahern, Essays, Edited by Stanley van der Ziel, 2009; "The Bird Swift".
• My Love to the Beaks and Tails, Annie Sise, Readers Union, 1976 (ISBN 0-575-01955-7); illustrations by Swift.
• Remembering How We Stood, John Ryan (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1975).
• "Patrick Swift", John Ryan, Envoy, vol 5/20, July 1951.
• Dead as Doornails, Anthony Cronin (Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1976)
• On the Look-out, CH Sission (Carcanet Press, Manchester, 1989).
• Collected Poems, C.H. Sission, Carcanet Press Ltd; 2nd Revised edition edition (27 Aug 1998); includes a 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”.
• The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Smart, David Gascoyne (ed.), Paladin, London, 1992.
• By Heart -The Life of Elizabeth Smart, Rosemary Sullivan (Flamingo, London, 1992).
• A Patrick Kavanagh Anthology, Platt, Eugene Robert, Ed., Commedia Publishing Co., Dublin, 1973; includes illustration of Kavanagh by Swift.
• Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist, Denis Sampson, Oxford University Press, Feb 2012,ISBN 978-0-19-964177-2.
• Edward McGuire - RHA, Brian Fallon, Irish Academic Press, 1991.
• Modern Art in Ireland, Dorothy Walker, The Lilliput Press, 1997.
• Martello Spring 1984, Maureen Charlton & John Stafford, Blackrock: Ardmore Records, 1984; illustrated with 6 coloured plates by Irish artists Walter Osborne, Patrick Swift & R.B. Beechey.
• Selected Poems, John Jordan (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 208); includes "Second Letter: To Patrick Swift"
• The Canterbury tales, translated into modern English prose by David Wright (London, Harris, 1964); endpapers by Patrick Swift.
• Selected Poems, Homage to George Barker (On his Sixtieth Birthday), John Heath-Stubbs & Martin Green, -eds, Martin Brian & O'Keefe Ltd, 1973; includes Swift's portrait of Barker and Swift's essay on Barker, Prolegomenon to George Barker(ISBN 0856161299; ISBN 0-85616-200-0).
• PN Review: Patrick Swift Obituary, PN Review 34, Volume 10 Number 2, November - December 1983 [2]; Fourteen Letters (to David Wright), C.H. Sisson, PN Review 39, Volume 11 Number 1, July - August 1984.[3]
• "The lost hope of Irish art", Aidan Dunne, , The Sunday Tribune, Nov 28, 1993.
• "The legacy of Patrick Swift", Brian Fallon, The Irish Times, Dec 2, 1993.
• "Young artist of promise", G.H.G, The Irish Times, Oct 3, 1952.
• "Lucian Freud: Prophet of Discomfort", Mic Moroney © 2007 Irish Arts Review [4]
• "The Fall and Rise of Patrick Swift", Brian Fallon, The Irish Times, 11 June 1992.

Solo exhibitions

• 2005 Paintings, drawings and watercolours by Patrick Swift, Office of Public Works Atrium, Dublin.
• 2002 An Irish Painter in Portugal Retrospective, Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork.
• 1994 Patrick Swift 1927-83, Ulster Museum.
• 1993 Patrick Swift 1927-83, Retrospective, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.
• 1974 Pinturas de Patrick Swift, Galeria S Mamede, Lisbon; apparently the catalogue is still available to buy at the Galeria's shop (key in Swift)[5]
• 1965 Desenhos do Algarve, Diário de Notícias Gallery, Lisbon; an exhibition of Swift's drawings for his book, Algarve: a portrait and a guide.
• 1952 Paintings by Patrick Swift, Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin.

Group exhibitions

• The Moderns, IMMA, Oct 2010- Feb 2011; Swift's Forget-me-[K]nots on a Cane Table & London Self-Portrait from IMMA's permanent collection.
• Lunds Konsthall, Sweden, 1972; Swift's Study (with Holly), a painting from his first group exhibition, Irish Exhibition of Living Art, 1950; Study (with Holly) was also exhibited at the Cork Rosc, Irish Art 1943-73, 1980.
• Portrait of Patrick Kavanagh (CIÉ collection): RHA, 1968; 1971 ROSC exhibition, The Irish Imagination; in 2005 it toured as part of the "CIE: Art On The Move" exhibitions.
• Contemporary Arts Society Exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1961; the Contemporary Arts Society bought Patrick Swift's The Garden, oil, 40 x 29.5 inches, 1959, and presented it to the Warrington Museum & Art Gallery.
• "Drawings, watercolours, gouache, ceramics", Victor Waddington Galleries, Dublin, 1954; five watercolours.
• Contemporary Irish Art, National Library of Wales, Aberystwth, 1953.
• Leicester Galleries, Jan 1952; Swift's Plants in a Potting Shed.
• Irish Exhibition of Living Art (1950, 51, 52, 54, 56)

Collections

• National Gallery of Ireland, Portrait of the Poet, Anthony Cronin, 1950; purchased 2010
• IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), Permanent Collection: Self-Portrait in the Studio & Forget-me-[K]nots on a cane table
• National Portrait Gallery (London): Patrick Joseph Kavanagh, lithograph, 1956, NPG D9523
• National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland, Limerick University: Self-Portrait, c.1950, ink on paper Image
• Warrington Museum & Art Gallery, The Garden, oil
• National Museums Northern Ireland, Botanic Gardens, Belfast, Positano Palm Tree, oil Image: BBC Your Paintings
• Glebe Gallery, Trees at St. Columb's, oil
• Dublin Writers Museum, Portrait of Patrick Kavanagh
• CIE Collection, Art on the move, Portrait of Patrick Kavanagh
• The Kelly Collection (Kelly’s Resort Hotel Rosslare), Trees in London, oil on board, purchased 2001, published in For the Love of Art, The Kelly Collection Image

Essays by Swift

• "David Wright", PN Review 14, Volume 6 Number 6, July - August 1980.
• "Prolegomenon to George Barker", X, 1960; later appeared in John Heath-Stubbs and Martin Green (eds) Homage to George Barker on his 60th Birthday (Martin Brian & O’Keefe, London, 1973).
• "The Bomberg Papers", edited by Swift, X, vol.1, no.3, June 1960; An Anthology from X, Oxford University Press, 1988.
• "The Painter in the Press" (under the pseudonym James Mahon ), X A Quarterly Review, vol. I, no.4, October 1960; An Anthology from X, Oxford University Press, 1988. read here
• "Official Art & The Modern Painter" (under the pseudonym James Mahon), X A Quarterly Review, vol. I, no., November, 1959
• "Mob Morals and the Art of loving Art" (under the pseudonym James Mahon), X A Quarterly Review, vol. I, no.3, June 1960; An Anthology from X, Oxford University Press, 1988.
• "Some notes on Caravaggio", Nimbus, 1956.
• "By Way of Preface" (taken from "A Report to the Committee of Cultural Relations, Dept of External Affairs, on a Year spent in Italy in the study of Art & Painting, December 1955"), Gandon Editions Biography, 1993. read here
• "Painting – The RHA Exhibition", The Bell, vol. 17, no. 13, June 1951.
• "The Artist Speaks", Envoy - A Review of Literature and Art, Vol. 4, no. 15, Feb 1951.
• "Nano Reid", Envoy – A Review of Literature and Art, March 1950. read here

References

1. ^ “Throughout his years in London, when he was right at the nerve centre of its art and literary life, he showed little interest in exhibiting his work." - Brian Fallon, "Patrick Swift and Irish Art" (1993), Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001(first published: Portfolio 2 - Modern Irish Arts Review, Gandon Editions, Cork, 1993); "Lucian Freud asks me if he is going to show in the new London Waddington’s, I answer that I did not think so, that I do not think he is interested in exhibiting his paintings. We are both puzzled.” - Anthony Cronin, Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions Biography, 1993; "And one day I found him in his underground flat in Westbourne Terrace busily taking down all his canvases (or rather hardboards, for in those days he couldn’t afford canvas) from the walls and stowing them away in a cellar. His reason was: a millionaire art fancier had rung up to say he was calling and Swift did not want him to buy, or so much as see, his work." - David Wright, Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993; "In the world in which we all moved at that time, I used to be curious as to the detachment Paddy showed to the market place, at his indifference to the fashionable galleries where Freud and Bacon were the beckoning lights, along with Frank Auerbach; it was as if he'd taken Joyce's Stephen Daedalus to heart- that once the work is created, it is no longer anything to do with the artist, who simply stands aside and pares his nails." - Martin Green (author), Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993; “Many people assumed he had stopped painting altogether” - Brian Fallon, “The fall and rise of Patrick Swift”, The Irish Times, June 11, 1992
2. ^ "He was a representational artist through and through, in the Kokoschka mould. Fidelity to visual experience above all."- Aidan Dunne, "The lost hope of Irish art", The Sunday Tribune, Nov 28, 1993
3. ^ "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."- Brian Fallon,"Patrick Swift and Irish Art" (1993), Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001
4. ^ ^{a b} Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1993, catalogue. Essay on Swift by Anthony Cronin (poet) and Aidan Dunne (art critic)
5. ^ Rosc Catalogue, Irish Imagination, 1971;Adams auctioneers catalogue notes.
6. ^ "No clichés are employed to simplify his task and no tricks are superimposed to foster an illusion of originality…He paints what he sees." – “Patrick Swift”, by John Ryan, Envoy: A Review of Literature and Art, July 1951, vol 5/20
7. ^ 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 later work verges on becoming abstract.
8. ^ John McGahern (Swift drew his portrait in London, 1960) noted that he was fond of the line "those particular trees/ that caught you in their mysteries": "It was he who first told me how well Constable wrote in letters about trees, especially the plane trees, with their peeled strips of bark -‘They soak up the polluted air’- and he quoted a favourite line, 'those particular trees/ that caught you in their mysteries’, mentioning that he preferred trees to flowers" ( "The Bird Swift", Love Of The World, John McGahern, Essays , Edited by Stanley van der Ziel, 2009). His later work is almost entirely composed of "tree portraits" and rural landscapes.
9. ^ "...the remarkable series of watercolours... It is just possible, of course, that Swift meant them as studies for large oils, but I very much doubt this. In the first place, they are very large as studies go, and in the second place, they are complete in themselves and need no reworking into another medium. Also, it is one of the peculiarities of his methods of working that he seems to have done few preliminary drawings or studies for his paintings; certainly few or no sketchbooks seem to have survived, though individual drawings have... a series of small works on paper survive from his London days, showing small angular views of parks and gardens, but once again, these works appear to be self-sufficient." – Brian Fallon (critic) ("Patrick Swift and Irish Art", Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001); "I remember him setting up an enormous canvas in the garden of Hatch Street...and, without any further ado, painting a portrait of a girl without any preliminary sketches or without squaring off the canvas, without any preliminary work whatever. Yet the finished product looked well thought out, as if it were the result of mature judgement." - John Ryan (Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, Kinsale, 1993); though Cronin noted (with regard to Swift painting a tree in Camden): “It takes him, as everything did, a long time to paint”.
10. ^ "A more rewarding approach to painting, in my opinion the only valid one, is to regard it as a deeply personal and private activity" - Swift, "By Way of Preface", from a Report to the Committee of Cultural Relations, Dept of External Affairs, on a Year spent in Italy in the study of Art & Painting, December 1955; "The Art of painting is itself an intensely personal activity. It may be labouring the obvious to say so but it is too little recognised in art journalism now that a picture is a unique and private event in the life of the painter: an object made alone with a man and a blank canvas...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: a picture which was merely the product of art would not be very interesting and could tell us nothing we were not already aware of." - X, "The Painter in the Press"
11. ^ “...an atmosphere of heightened realism which… is intensely personal and strangely disturbing.” - G.H.G. (usual signature for Tony Gray), The Irish Times, Oct 3, 1952
12. ^ ""The most important factor, the element of mystery" - "The Painter in the Press", X magazine, Oct. 1960; "There are some sciences involved in the making and in the study of pictures, but the art itself is finally not a science and will not submit to scientific regimentation because its life depends on the degree to which it is inhabited by mystery, speaks to us of the unknown." - X, "The Painter in the Press"
13. ^ "But Paddy Swift was cunningly dismissive of his art: ‘It’s just making marks, dear boy’, he would say, ‘just making marks. A way of passing the time.'" - Tim Motion, Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993.
14. ^ "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." - Swift in his Portuguese notebook, Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, 1993(ISBN 0-946641-37-4)
15. ^ "He was largely self taught (although, in any case, the kind of art teaching which Dublin offered at the time would merely have frustrated or enraged him)"- Brian Fallon, "Patrick Swift and Irish Art" (1993), Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001
16. ^ “In the late forties and early fifties, there was a house in Lower Baggot Street , where rooms could be rented by the day or night for lectures, meetings, or for any other lawful purpose. Patrick Swift, the artist, had a flat in this house.” - Brendan Behan, Interviews and Recollections, Volume 1, E. H. Mikhail (editor), Gill and Macmillan (1982), p41Google Books
17. ^ "Freud had already shown in London and Paris when he came to Dublin in 1948 [this is most likely when Swift and Freud first met], partly on a pilgrimage to Jack B Yeats, who had just enjoyed a retrospective at the Tate; and whom Freud declared the greatest living painter… Freud seemed closest to artist Paddy Swift…In September 1951 Kitty Garman wrote to her mother…She mentions Freud working on a painting in Paddy Swift’s Hatch Street studio, Dead Cock’s Head 1951, painted on the same red velvet chair as Swift’s Woodcock 1951 - "Lucian Freud: Prophet of Discomfort", Mic Moroney © 2007 Irish Arts Review link; "He had met Freud by 1949... My grasp of chronology is not always accurate, but certainly the acquaintance was well-developed by 1950 when we shared the ground-floor of a house in Hatch Street together. Lucian, who was staying in Ireland, used to come around in the mornings to paint, so that sometimes when I would surface around ten or eleven I would find them both at work in the studio next door." - Anthony Cronin, Patrick Swift 1927-83, 1993 IMMA Retrospective Catalogue
18. ^ "Yet, while Swift may seem a rara avis in this artistic climate, he was less isolated in Irish art than he appears today... he belonged- insofar as a man so individualistic can belong to any specific trend- to a tendency which showed itself in the Living Art exhibitions of the early 1950s. It was in this context that Swift first made his mark, even before Waddington took him up." – Brian Fallon (critic), "Patrick Swift And Irish Art" (1993), Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001(first published: Portfolio 2 - Modern Irish Arts Review, Gandon Editions, Cork, 1993); "Patrick Swift had graduated from the National College of Art and immediately established himself as a significant painter with work shown at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1950. In addition to painting, he had wide intellectual and literary interests." – Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist, Denis Sampson, Oxford University Press, 2012
19. ^ Monday, Oct. 20, 1952 (1952-10-20). "Art: Life with a Shillelagh". TIME. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,817146,00.html#ixzz0XzMxbV1r. Retrieved 2009-12-01. 
20. ^ “Patrick Swift has painted himself holding a dead woodcock. People who know the painter have described this as a double self-portrait; for the most striking physical qualities of Swift are his bird-like head and face. His close-textured brown hair sits on his head like a cap of feathers; his nose is long, prominent and beaky; his eyes are a greenish hazel, like a seagull's, and are as alert as a watching gull's, but without the predatory cruelty." - "Quidnunc" (Seamus Kelly), "An Irishman's Diary", The Irish Times, Oct 11, 1952
21. ^ "A motif of Swift's work at this time was his bird imagery, which appeared to him to have symbolic overtones, and may even have been a subtle form of self-portraiture. Certainly Seamus Kelly, in his 'Quidnunc' column a few days after the Waddington opening, noted that the artist himself resembled one of his own birds- beaknosed, sharp-eyed, wiry, with a kind of nervous, intense presence. The self-portrait mentioned bears this out, with its questioning, almost withdrawn look. This is the typical Irish artist-intellectual of the post-war years..." – Brian Fallon (critic), "Patrick Swift and Irish Art" (1993), Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001(first published: Portfolio 2 - Modern Irish Arts Review, Gandon Editions, Cork, 1993)
22. ^ “From early on Swift was associated with literary magazines...” - Brian Fallon, "The fall and rise of Patrick Swift", The Irish Times, June 11, 1992
23. ^ Nano Reid, by Patrick Swift, Envoy, March 1950;Read article here
24. ^ “Around one o'clock the Envoy office would empty itself into John McDaid's, a small, narrow, high-ceilinged pub at 3 Harry Street, where much of the journal's business was conducted. The clientele was a mixture of working class and bohemian.” - Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, Antoinette Quinn, Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2001, p: 295
25. ^ Swift & Cronin later stopped speaking to Behan due, in their view, to Behan’s ill treatment of Kavanagh. See postcard from Behan to John Ryan (Letters of Brendan Behan, E.H. Mikhail, a postcard from Tijuana, Mexico, to John Ryan dated 12 July 1961; the Murals of Diego Rivera printed on the postcard:Google Books):

    Dear Hemmingway Ryan, A strange thing – I was thinking of Swift and Cronin and all when I saw this – I shed a tear of tequila into my vaso. F Scott Behan - I’d better say ‘Kavanagh would loved the place’ – I’m quite sure he wouldn’t – I hope he’s well.

26. ^ Beckett had an extract from Watt appear in Envoy in 1950. Following his mother's funeral Beckett spent the afternoon with Swift in McDaid's, later to be joined by the rowdy Kavanagh & O'Nolan (Gandon Editions Biography, 1993)
27. ^ "A Patrick Swift portrait (possibly Beckett)" - "Irish art market springs to life", Niall Falon, The Irish Times, June 1, 1991
28. ^ "...his brand of mannered exactitude was a great influence on the young Edward McGuire" – Aidan Dunne, "The lost hope of Irish art", The Sunday Tribune, Nov 28, 1993; "McGuire’s starting point as an artist was Swift’s work, a fact which he himself repeatedly acknowledged" – Brian Fallon, "The fall and rise of Patrick Swift", The Irish Times, June 11, 1992; "It may have been in some seedy, arty Soho pub that Edward met the Irish painter Patrick Swift... Swift’s work is currently neglected but I have little doubt that it was the biggest factor in forming Edward’s own style, and Anthony Cronin agrees with me... [Edward’s widow, Sally, says] that he admitted the debt himself: ‘he always said that it was Swift who put him on the right road’. But exactly where they first met is impossible to say; both men are dead and Swift’s widow, Mrs Oonagh Swift, says she does not know the details of her late husband’s early life [-p41]... [Cronin] is certain, however, that Freud came regularly in the summer of 1951, or possibly 1952, to a studio Patrick Swift had in Hatch Street. Is it possible that Edward had met Swift as early as this, and if so, did he encounter Freud there? [-p47]...His debt to Lucian Freud has been stressed, but the debt to Patrick Swift in less known, though Edward told Harriet Cooke in an interview for The Irish Times (17 April, 1978): ‘Patrick Swift was instrumental in my starting to paint; Patrick Swift and Lucien Freud, they were both people I was in sympathy with.’[-p73]"- Edward McGuire - RHA, Brian Fallon, Irish Academic Press, 1991
29. ^ Photographs by Farson from this period include Freud, Swift and Behan in Dublin in 1952 [1]
30. ^ Snoddy, Theo (2002). Dictionary of Irish Artists. Dublin. p. 640. 
31. ^ Brian Fallon (critic), "Patrick Swift And Irish Art" (1993), Patrick Swift: An Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001(first published: Portfolio 2 - Modern Irish Arts Review, Gandon Editions, Cork, 1993.)
32. ^ Dom Moraes was involved with X magazine and often stayed at 9 Westbourne Terrace: "With David Wright as co-editor, Swift decided to start a new quarterly. Dom Moraes was co-opted as an unofficial assistant" - The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker, Robert Fraser (Jonathan Cape, 2001)
33. ^ "...his is ability to communicate certain truths on what one senses to be a deeply spiritual level. It is perhaps this quality in his work which links Swift with the world of poetry and poets. Apart from close family members, poets were almost exclusively subjects of his portraits; the series of poet portraits shown at IMMA [1993 Retrospective] are quite exceptional by any standards and must place him among the very best Irish painters of the twentieth century." - Wanda Ryan Smolin writing in the Irish Arts Review 1994
34. ^ Brian Fallon, "Patrick Swift and Irish Art" (1993), Patrick Swift: an Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001
35. ^ “In London Swift, almost inevitably, moved into the Soho bohemia which included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, George Barker, W.S. Graham, John Minton, William Crozier” – “The fall and rise of Patrick Swift”, Brian Fallon, The Irish Times, June 11, 1992
36. ^ " The Flat at 9 Westbourne Terrace was itself a mini-Soho" - Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, Gill & Macmillan, 2001; Christopher Barker (son of George Barker and Elizabeth Smart, who lived upstairs from Swift at 9 Westbourne Terrace and wrote French cookbooks with Swift's wife): "On many occasions through the early Sixties, writers and painters such as David Gascoyne, Paddy Kavanagh, Roberts MacBryde and Colquhoun and Paddy Swift would gather at Westbourne Terrace in Paddington, our family home at that time. They came for editorial discussions about their poetry magazine, X." ("Christopher Barker on his parents, George Barker and Elizabeth Smart| Books | The Observer". London: Guardian. 2006-08-20. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/20/poetry.features. Retrieved 2009-12-01. )
37. ^ He restored and designed a 17C building that today is the O Leão de Porches restaurant; the Rouxinol restaurant in Monchique; the original building and entrance to the International School of the Algarve, which Swift was instrumental in founding; his house on the cliffs outside Carvoeiro; numerous buildings in Algarve display hand-crafted ornamental plasterwork by Swift, akin to pargeting or relief in cement, generally depicting birds, animals and foliage.
38. ^ “He moved to London, a melting pot of cultural and artistic ideas. At home in 'the Bohemian jungle of Soho', he partook of artistic and, always, literary life.” - Aidan Dunne, "The lost hope of Irish art", The Sunday Tribune, Nov 28, 1993
39. ^ David Wright's introduction to An Anthology from X, selected by David Wright (Oxford University Press 1988)
40. ^ ^{a b c} O’Mara, Veronica (1993). Ps…of Course, Patrick Swift 1927-83. Dublin: Gandon Books. 
41. ^ For Swift’s involvement with McGahern in getting his first novel published see Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist by Denis Sampson (OUP, 2012)
42. ^ Patrick Swift 1927-83, Gandon Editions, Kinsale, 1993 (ISBN 0-946641-37-4)
43. ^ David Wright (An Anthology from X, Oxford University Press, 1988): "These poems [19 of Kavanagh's poems were published] had been posted to me by Swift, whose brother James had invaded the poet's flat in Dublin, gathered up the trampled manuscripts scattered about the floor, and had them sorted, typed, and bound. One of the carbon copies was sent to me." Antoinette Quinn (Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography), however, says that the idea of Jimmy Swift invading the poet's flat is a myth. Quinn states that Kavanagh had a typescript rejected by Macmillan's and that subsequently Swift, on one of his trips to Dublin, "was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published. He had to returned to London… but persuaded Kavanagh to entrust the precious typescript to his brother, Jimmy, to have three copies professionally typed up...[Jimmy,] acting under his brothers instructions... sent one copy each to David Wright and Martin Green in London" (Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, Antoinette Quinn, Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2001, p: 350-351). Wright's version of events is, no doubt, the story put out by Swift himself, and one which would not have displeased Kavanagh.
44. ^ "It was following the suggestion of the painter Patrick Swift and the poet Anthony Cronin that the publication came about." - Martin Green(who put together the first collection of Kavanagh's poems for MacGibbon and Kee), Martin Green in a letter to The Guardian, 2005
45. ^ Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, by Antoinette Quinn, Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2001, p: 359 (ISBN 0-7171-2651-X / 0-7171-2651-X )
46. ^ Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, by Antoinette Quinn, Gill & Macmillan Ltd, 2001, p: 297 (ISBN 0-7171-2651-X / 0-7171-2651-X )
47. ^ “In London he generally stayed with the Swifts” - Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, Gill & Macmillan, 2001
48. ^ Brian Fallon, "Patrick Swift and Irish Art" (1993), Patrick Swift: an Irish Painter in Portugal, Gandon Editions, 2001; Portfolio 2 - Modern Irish Arts Review, Gandon Editions, Cork, 1993
49. ^ Patrick Swift 1927-83 - PS...of course, Veronica O'Mara (ed.), Gandon Editions, Kinsale, 1993. In 1984 Swift's widow, Oonagh, organized a gathering of his friends in the Algarve where it was decided that John Ryan would put together a book to commemorate Swift's life. Ryan, however, had been suffering from ill health for many years and passed away in 1992 before completing his commemorative book.
50. ^ "The lost hope of Irish art ... belated recognition for Patrick Swift, a painter born out of his time." - Aidan Dunne, "The lost hope of Irish art", Sunday Tribune, Nov 28, 1993."His exhibition at the Royal Hospital quite simply bowled me over, and I realised at once that I was looking at pictures by probably the most formidable Irish artist of this century - perhaps including Jack Yeats...Some of the strongest contemporary portraits I have ever seen." - Derek Hill in a letter to The Irish Times, Jan 24, 1994; "A man who made his paintings talk...He may well be one of the greatest of Irish painters. When the dust has settled and the critics have had their say, the paintings will speak for themselves ... His paintings hold you and address you in a language so intimate and disturbingly personal that even if you don't know much about art you are aware you have been moved at a visceral level." - The Sunday Business Post, Feb 20, 1994; "Probably no painter here since the Literary Revival has had a more central role in cultural life in the broader sense. And not only in Ireland either; Swift was a seminal figure in London too, even if the general public knew very little of him... There can be few Irishmen of his epoch, whether poets or painters or novelists, who are of such biographical interest and who touched their age at so many key points." - Brian Fallon, "The legacy of Patrick Swift", The Irish Times, Dec 2, 1993; "The Irish public was astonished when a major Swift exhibition was mounted in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 1994." – Modern Art in Ireland, Dorothy Walker, The Lilliput Press, 1997, p43; "Certainly, from now onwards, no one can write Patrick Swift out of Irish art history." - Brian Fallon,The Irish Times, Dec 8, 1993
51. ^ Rotherham Roadshow, Sunday 3rd October, 2004 ( Image); the father of the lady who brought Swift's work to the ARS seems to have been a sort of patron of Swift’s.
52. ^ Quotes are taken from his Portuguese Notes. All can be found in his biography, Patrick Swift 1927-83 (Gandon Editions, 1993)

Further reading

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Patrick Swift

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Patrick Swift

• BBC Your Paintings
• David Wright Obituary, The Independent.
• 20th Century British and Irish Art, Writings by Art Commentator and Historian Adrian Clark, March 2011 [6]
• Shifting Ground, The Moderns, Irish Art 1950s, 08/10/2010 [7]
• David Wright portrait; mentions they first met in London in 1953; also mentions that at that period Swift had a studio in Camden.
• Irish Independent, a note on Swift’s Kavanagh portrait [8]
• Brian O'Doherty, a.k.a. Patrick Ireland (artist and critic), "Irish Painting, 1953: Some Thoughts", The Irish Monthly; on Swif's painting of a cabbage: "Patrick Swift's adventurous, deeply interesting and brilliant painting of? A cabbage!"[9] View said cabage:[10]
• AskArt [11]
• Whytes (Irish Auctioneers) www.whytes.i.e. (key in 'Swift' only) [12]
• Adams (Irish Auctioneers) www.adams.i.e. (key in 'Swift' only) [13]
• Maurice Fitzpatrick, interview with Anthony Cronin
• A poem by Basil Payne on Swift's Kavanagh portrait [14]
• Patrick Kavanagh life: “drank in celebration of the accidental destruction of the Abbey Theatre by fire with Anthony Cronin, John Ryan, and Paddy Swift (‘It gave great pleasure to all the right people’).” [15]
• Link to where James Liddy, an Irish poet, mentions Swift and Kavanagh in McDaids after Kavanagh's UCD lecture in 1956: "The painter Paddy Swift is there, a dark Prince Hallish to Kavanagh's Falstaff." [16]
• Catalogue for Swift's Victor Waddington Galleries exhibition, 1952, held at the National Library of Ireland [17]
• Lilly Library, Indian University, has many of the X magazine files. [18]
• The Irish Times, a note on the unveiling of a plaque commemorating Swift at his Hatch Street Studio [19]
• Irish Independent, article on the artist Michael Farrell (Says he knew Swift in Soho) [20]
• The Irish Times, interview with Irish art collector Lambert: "asked who he would consider to be most seriously under-celebrated of modern Irish artists, Lambert replies with a hint of regret: 'Patrick Swift, a fine artist.'"[21]
• Irish Independent, article on John Jordan: “Lady Longford, who lived near the young Jordan, lent him Ulysses at the beginning of his last year in school; he read it in the 'quite preposterously romantic setting' of Woodenbridge, Co Wicklow, that September with the painter Patrick Swift” [22]
• Irish Independent, "Freud: A magical recluse" [23]
• Swift Images [24]
• Irish artist Reginald Gray: "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."[25]
• Lucian Freud Obituary, Financial Times: "Freud had become part of the bohemian Soho-based milieu of artists and intellectuals who included Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Ron Kitaj and the Irish painter and writer Patrick Swift, who published some of Freud’s early works in his cultural review X Magazine"

External links

• Porches Pottery website