Patrick Swift: Poet’s Painter 1927-1983

Patrick Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. Patrick Swift was a painter and cultural figure in Dublin Ireland and London England before moving to the Algarve in Southern Portugal, where he is buried in the town of Porches. During his career Swift had 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. He avoided exhibitions in general and his work was rarely shown. After his 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.

At his death in 1983, he had been totally 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.

Swift was educated at a Christian Brothers School in Dublin. Although primarily a self-taught artist, Swift attended night classes at the National College of Art in 1947.

His work comprises mostly tree portraits, rural and urban landscapes. Swift worked in a variety of media including oils, watercolor, ink, charcoal, lithography and ceramics. It is one of the eccentricities of his of work that Swift did no preliminary drawings or studies.

During his Dublin period he shared an apartment with his girlfriend, American poet Claire McAllister. Painter Lucian Freud was a frequent visitor -his stayed in Hatch Street when he was courting of his current love, Lady Caroline Blackwood- he even hared Swift’s studio.

Swift’s work can be divided into three periods named after the three places he lived: Dublin, London, and Algarve. In his early work, “Dublin”, he used a very thin paint surface. In “London” Swift applied thick layers of paint, using the brush more and manipulating the surface. In the “Algarve period” (named after the town in Portugal he fell in love with and lived in), his work is characterized by a solid, broken impasto.
Some of his late work can even be called abstract. And there are no rough drafts of his work.

Swift was a poets' painter as well - many of his close friends were poets and they lauded Swift as their painter Swift painted portraits of poets George Barker, Patrick Cavanaugh, David Wright, Brian Higgins, John Heath-Stubbs, and Paul Potts.

Swift's life cut short, when he was at the top of his artistic career. His last -unfinished- painting is a portrait of an elderly couple with a baby set in the Wicklow Mountains in Wicklow county Ireland.

Melissa Montgomery