Anne Madden reminded me of my mum. Both had spent childhood years in Chile, both adored their fathers, fought with their mothers. Both were spectacularly fearless horsewomen. I never quite worked out if my grandmother Gaga, was one of Anne’s father’s four sisters, what did that make Anne to me? Who cared? There was red wine to be drunk, endless hours to be had discussing, and dissecting, painters, writers, politicians, poets.
Covid lockdown had just lifted. But Anne’s husband of 53 years, painter Louis le Brocquy had died, and her right hand woman of 38 years had returned home to the Philippines. She was alone. I became friend, buyer of soup, internet wrangler, occasional roller of joints (“Can’t you roll them any faster?”), and devoted admirer. “For Rosita,” she wrote in a book she gifted me, “who talks and laughs with me about everything”.
We had such fun.
Brought up in Chile she made the 6,000-mile journey back to England, then Ireland, when she was 11. Her mother, like many a posh mum of her day, “didn’t really like children”.
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“There was no pill you could take then,” Anne laughs, but there was pain there as well. She and her sister were sent off to boarding school while mum and dad skied and partied. “I got the impression my mother would have preferred boys.”
Then catastrophe. Her father, along with the man whose wife he had fallen in love with, William Wordsworth’s granddaughter, was killed in a car crash. Back at boarding school Anne remembered being semi wild with grief. “You didn’t want anyone to come near you. To touch you. Anyone to say they’re terribly sorry or anything like that. That would have been fatal.” Her highly defended inner self must have strengthened during that terrible time.
Riding with her godmother through the drystone lanes of the Burren was her escape.
It nearly became her end when she fell, her mare on top of her. Her spine badly injured. It took years, painful operations, months confined to a plaster of paris sarcophagus to repair.
[ Portraits of the artists: Anne Madden and Francis BaconOpens in new window ]
By now living with Louis, relocation to a warm climate was medically recommended. After marriage in Chartres Cathedral in France, Anne looking very white and rather overwhelmed, the newlyweds headed south, to Carros, to a studio designed by an Irish architect friend and started working. They stayed, working, living “a paradisal life” for 35 years.
When they returned to Dublin - Anne transforming two artisan cottages in Portobello into an artwork of their own - it was conceded in the tightly knit Dublin art world that she had the best legs in town, but she was accused of name-dropping.
But in France with Louis there were lunches attended by Chagall and Matisse. Samuel Beckett did proffer personal advice, (“go into your dark, confront it”) and Francis Bacon was a close friend. Doing a review of the monumental 2021 biography of Bacon, Revelations, Anne pulled photos from a huge drawer of her with Bacon, she giving him the mother and father of a dressing down. He, like a scolded schoolboy, taking it. “You gave out to Francis Bacon?” “Of course.”
Anne was incredibly posh. Very beautiful. Fiercely opinionated. Hugely ambitious for her work, and her legacy. Despite the lunches with Matisse and Chagall, the get-togethers with Lee Miller, Giacometti, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Joan Mitchell, endlessly discussing art with other artists, making art, perfecting their craft, was her and Louis’s life. They were incredibly productive, with galleries in France, London and Dublin, and frequent major exhibitions.
In the midst of all they had their two beautiful boys - Alexis and Pierre. And a seemingly unfair degree of tragedy. Anne’s sister was killed in a plane crash along with her husband. Anne was named guardian for their three young children. The family of two became a family of five. It cannot have been easy - grieving the loss of her sister while more than doubling the size of her family. Then her brother Jeremy died following a fall down a very dangerous staircase.
To each shattering loss Anne responded with paintings. The Icarus Series. The Northern Lights series. The Megalith Series. The Garden of Love. Time and Space.
[ Anne Madden’s odyssey from the labyrinth to the heavensOpens in new window ]
And then came the final Seven Paintings. Now in IMMA’s permanent collection they encompass one of Anne’s lifelong passions - women’s place in the patriarchy. From Antigone to Leda to schoolgirl Ann Lovett. Returning from the dazzle of Abstract Impressionism to the figurative work of her earliest years.
“Painting is very elusive,” Anne said in the 2010 Mind the Gap documentary about her: Painter and Muse. “Once you think you’ve caught it by its tail it’s off again.”
In the same documentary she said she often feels like she’s falling, Gravity “tugging” her down. “One day I’ll just be ‘a little handful of dust’.”
“Maybe though”, she said then, laughing, “my spirit freed, could bound off into the universe”.
That spirit will be desperately missed. Most fiercely by Pierre who’s been by her side for the past two years. And by Alexis her first born. But also by so many friends who have enjoyed her huntress’s eye, indomitable courage and wonderful laugh.
Goodbye Anne. O goodbye.
Rosita Sweetman is an author and activist
