There are a large number of reasons to find the work of Garret Morphy fascinating, not least the fact that, in many respects, his career marks the beginning of post-mediaeval Irish art.
As Professor Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin observe in their 1978 book The Painters of Ireland 1660-1920, Morphy "is of the greatest significance in Irish painting, as he combined English with continental influences and is the first painter to raise the quality of Irish art from its first provincial fumblings to a more competent professional level".
Morphy's work is not without its flaws, but he was certainly superior to any other artist in Ireland at the time and he also left to future generations a series of portraits of a social class about to disappear.
That group were the old Roman Catholic landowners, often of English origin, painted by Morphy before they lost their estates and frequently went into exile. He shared the same religious faith and during the years he spent in England, his commissions appear to have come from members of Catholic families. "The first Irish-born painter of any stature," according to Crookshank and Glin, Morphy's early years are obscure although in his Dictionary of Irish Artists Walter Strickland claims the painter was born in Dublin, probably some time in the 1650s. By 1673, he was living in London and there seems to have worked in the studios of a number of established artists such as Edmund Ashfield, another Roman Catholic.
Morphy eventually returned to Ireland and his services were obviously in constant demand: this perhaps explains why, as Jane Fenlon, who published a thorough study of Morphy and his extant work in the Irish Arts Review 1991-92, comments, his canvases regularly show the use of rapid brushwork.
Many of his subjects are given the same standard poses, female sitters, for example, usually being depicted with a dreamy gaze and their head resting on a raised right hand. Men, on the other hand, just as commonly have their bodies slightly twisted away from the viewer while the right arm gestures across the torso. The latter pose was probably taken from the English portraitist Lely, to whom Morphy owed a clear debt; Fenlon also detects the influence of French artist Henri Gascars.
Morphy can be considered something of a proto-romantic, as is clear from a portrait usually believed to be of the first Lord Bellew, in which the subject is shown reclining in a parkland setting, a small lapdog beside him.
Even if the poses given to sitters show little variation, in Morphy's best work the execution of fabric and drapery can be highly effective. This is true of a particularly important work from his hand which came up for sale last month at de Vere's art auctions. Morphy's portrait of Mrs Poole, which fetched £22,000, is picked out for mention by Crookshank and Glin, who enthuse over the canvas's "fresh scarlet velvet and almost iridescent bluey greys".
But is not only for its painterly qualities that Morphy's portrait of Mrs Poole is significant, as the picture is one of the very few that he signed and, in this instance, also dated 1704. It is, therefore, of enormous interest to anyone studying his life and work.
