CECIL MAGUIRE
Born: January 20th, 1930
Died: May 7th, 2020
Highest prices achieved at auction- (inc fees)
1. €31,150 – Whytes, Dublin – 30.04.2007
2. €27,412 – Adams, Dublin – 31.03.2004
3. €27,412 – Whytes, Dublin – 28.09.2009
Born in Lurgan, Armagh, Cecil Maguire was a Northern Irish landscape and figure painter whose paintings of the west of Ireland are widely appreciated. Maguire captured the social and cultural life of the west of Ireland in his impressionist paintings of horse fairs, sailing regattas, funerals and coastal and mountainous scenes
After graduating from the Queen’s University Belfast in 1951, he took an English teaching post at Lurgan College, a post he remained in until retirement in 1981.
He became a member of the Royal Ulster Academy in 1974, winning both the Silver Medal (1964, 1967) and the Gold Medal there (1993). , as well as the Conor Prize (1968).In 1971 he began exhibiting at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin and between 1982 and 1992 he exhibited at the Oriel Gallery in Dublin in a series of solo exhibitions. . Maguire travelled, he divided his time between Italy, Belfast and the West of Ireland but lived and worked for a great part of the year in Roundstone, Connemara – an area that has always been the inspiration for much of his work.
From the early 1980s to the 1990s, Maguire exhibited his paintings at the Oriel Gallery in Dublin and then moved to the Leinster Gallery, his work was also shown at the Bell Gallery in Belfast and Martin Davison’s Straid and Davison Galleries. Davison published a book on Maguire’s paintings, entitled Towards a Retrospective in 2002. In the introduction, Davison writes of Maguire’s passion for the west of Ireland and how he captured an Ireland where the old ways were in decline. In the book, Maguire himself wrote about how painting is an attempt to capture the emotion, the excitement of an experience. “There has to be an emotional jolt, then an attempt . . . to recapture that feeling, that trick of light. To see that familiar landscape in an unfamiliar way and convey that in the painting.”
His work appears in such collections as those at the UN headquarters in New York and the Ulster Museum in Belfast
Cecil Maguire died in May 2020 at the age of 90.