Alicia Boyle

Alicia Louisa Letitia Boyle RBA, RHA, RUA (1 August 1908 – 11 January 1997) was an Irish abstract marine and landscape artist.

Alicia Boyle was born on 1 August 1908 to Brudenell P Boyle, an engineer, and his wife Birney in Bangkok, Siam.

Boyle had two brothers.

She was raised in Limavady in Northern Ireland and moved to London, England with her family at the age of ten.

At the age of two Boyle contracted cholera.

Boyle began to paint at the age of five.

Her parents encouraged her to paint around Limavady and Magilligan.

Her mother also introduced her to the work of playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Seán O'Casey, and George Bernard Shaw.

Together they attended the theatre and art exhibitions.

When her Mother died and her Father remarried, Boyle felt unable to remain in the family home and left to live in a bedsit.

At the age of seventeen Boyle enrolled on a teacher-training course at Clapham Art Training School where she studied for four years.

From 1929 until 1934 Boyle attended Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting, where she studied drawing, painting and mural decoration under Ernest Jackson.

Boyle was a prizewinning student who won two scholarships whilst at Byam.

Boyle's early work was influenced by Matisse, Picasso, Goya and Hokusai.

Having viewed Hokusai's work at the British Museum and also in attending the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, Boyle began to draw with a quill and ink.

She became interested in calligraphy and prepared her own quills, a practice that she was to continue throughout her life.

In 1932 Boyle's painting Lot's Wife was displayed at the Royal Academy of Arts annual show.

She won a commission to produce a mural for the Nurse's Home at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children two years later, which is no longer extant.

One of the most significant paintings of her early career was a critique of fascism, entitled Machines of Learning of 1938.

In 1939 Boyle travelled to Mykonos in the Aegean Islands as an invited artist at the School of Fine Art.

The resulting works were shown in an exhibition in Athens which financed a two-month painting expedition to Italy before she returned to England before the outbreak of World War II.

Boyle was appointed as part-time teacher at Northampton High School for Girls in January 1940.

During this time Boyle designed stage-sets for ballets and plays by Tolstoy, Shaw and Shakespeare She later secured a post at Northampton Art College where the actor Jonathan Adams numbered amongst her many students.

Boyle was later engaged as a visiting lecturer at West Sussex College and Farnham School of Art.

Boyle began exhibiting at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1944.

She was to show annually in their Artists of Fame and Promise exhibition for more than a quarter of a century.

Boyle held her first solo exhibition in the Peter Jones Gallery in London in 1945, which afforded her the luxury of reducing her teaching hours.

As the decade drew to a close Boyle became inspired by her native land after visits to Donegal and Connemara when she began to portray Irish subjects and scenes.

Boyle became a member of the Midland Regional Group of Artists and Designers with whom she exhibited in the autumn of 1948 and also in 1949 Boyle debuted in Ulster with a solo exhibition at the CEMA gallery in the spring of 1950, where she displayed The red, red Cock, shown to critical acclaim at the Leger Galleries in the previous year.

A second masterpiece of this era, White Horse was inspired by a chance meeting with locals near Claidhneach, Connemara in 1949.

In 1949 she held a one-woman show in London's Leger Galleries and another at the same venue in 1951.

The Council For the Encouragement for Music and the Arts (CEMA) purchased the painting in 1950, and displayed in an exhibition of CEMA purchases at their 55a Donegall Place gallery in 1954.

The 24 picture collection comprised work from Romeo Toogood, Colin Middleton and Sidney Smith amongst others.

Her narrative paintings of this period were inspired by the people and folktales she gathered on her travels, leading her to depict farmers and weavers, and into producing paintings that established her artistic reputation in Ulster.

Her literary inspirations at this time were Marcel Proust, García Lorca, and later Frank O'Connor, Flann O'Brien and Seamus Heaney.

The Belfast Municipal Gallery purchased Potato-Washers, Connemara on the opening day of the 1950 show.

Boyle showed once more with CEMA in 1952 and once again, at the Belfast Municipal Gallery in 1959.

The Scottish Committee of the Arts Council welcomed an exhibition of Contemporary Ulster Painting to Edinburgh where Boyle showed alongside George Campbell, Gerard Dillon, Paul Nietsche and Nevill Johnson.

The foreword to the catalogue was written by the poet, critic and curator John Hewitt.

Boyle presented an exhibition of watercolours at the Walker's Gallery, London in 1958.