Louis le Brocquy - Telegraph When he decided to turn to art, at the age of 21, he was entirely self-taught. In the first instance, he went to London, to take in the National Gallery and the Tate. He also went to Paris and to Geneva, where an exhibition of paintings from the Prado in Madrid was being shown; thus he gained a thorough grounding in the Old Masters - Velásquez, Goya, Manet and Cézanne in particular - before settling down in the South of France, at Menton and Cap Ferrat, with his first wife, Jean Stoney, whom he married in 1938. The outbreak of war forced him to return to Ireland in 1940, and in 1941 he moved to London, where he first made a living painting murals, producing stained-glass murals for public houses, and designing sets for the stage. Le Brocquy began to experiment with colour, fostered by his interest in their chemical and physical properties. Gradually, however, his canvases of handsomely proportioned figure groups became flooded with pigments from the pale end of the spectrum. Indeed, as many critics have noted over the years, white was perhaps to become the colour most closely associated with his work in whatever medium. Le Brocquy enjoyed his greatest appreciation from British critics at this period, and in 1956 he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. He was now also a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art, and in the same year he met the Irish painter Anne Madden, who two years later would become his second wife. She herself was the subject of his most important group of paintings of this period - the "Presence" paintings (1957), which were made during the course of a series of major operations which she had had to undergo at this time to correct the consequences of a serious teenage riding accident. The white in these works is the white of the plaster cast in which she was encased for months, the red slash the surgery she had had to endure. After their marriage, le Brocquy and Anne Madden went to live in the South of France, and in 1960 moved to the villa in the Alpes Maritimes where they were to bring up their two sons. But it was in this apparently idyllic working environment, where he shared a purpose-built studio with his wife, that le Brocquy suffered something of a major artistic crisis: in 1963 he destroyed a large number of his paintings as he sought to find fresh inspiration. This was finally to come in the form of a visit to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, where he found himself particularly struck by the Polynesian "head cult" - human skulls overlaid with clay to preserve the spirit within. These became the starting point first for a series of Ancestral Heads, anonymous in character, and then, in the 1970s, for the series of Head Images in which he sought to arrive at an imaginative understanding of great individual consciousnesses - Samuel Beckett, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, James Joyce, WB Yeats, Picasso and le Brocquy's friend Bacon, among others. It was a departure in which, as the critic Herbert Read put it, he became "emancipated from provincial art" and "both independent and universal." Le Brocquy also ventured into printmaking and tapestry, most notably around the subject of The Táin, the early Irish epic also known as The Cattle Raid of Cooley which was published in translation by the poet Thomas Kinsella in 1969. Le Brocquy provided the illustrations for Kinsella's version, and later transformed his stark, dramatic black and white lithographs into one of his most successful tapestry series, some of the crowd scenes depicted becoming as near to the purely abstract as anything in his work. If this was Irish culture seen and interpreted from the safety of Europe (like so much of the work of great Irish artistic exiles, notably Beckett and Joyce), le Brocquy's reputation in his home country was secure, and in 1996, at the age of 80, he returned to Dublin, the city of his birth. The Irish art establishment had recognised his achievements decades earlier, and in 1989 he had been appointed to the founding board of Dublin's newly established Museum of Modern Art; 13 years later he became the first living Irish artist to have a work bought by the museum when his canvas, A Family, painted in 1951, entered its collection. A tall, handsome man of considerable charm, in old age le Brocquy became a familiar figure on the streets of Dublin and in the galleries and museums that he had visited so often in his youth. Louis le Brocquy is survived by Anne Madden, by the daughter of his first marriage, Seyre, and by the two sons of his second, Alexis and Pierre. Louis le Brocquy, born November 10 1916, died April 25 2012