William Crozier was educated at the Glasgow School of Art (1949-53). On graduating he spent time in Paris and Dublin before settling in London, where he quickly gained great notoriety for his work. By 1961 William Crozier was widely seen as one of the most exciting artists in London. Soho was his habitual haunt with fellow raconteurs William Irvine, Robert MacBryde, Robert Colquhoun, and intermittent comrades Francis Bacon, William Turnbull, and Eduardo Paolozzi. His first solo exhibition was in 1960 at the Drian Gallery, followed by another in 1961, and then three shows in consecutive years from 1962 at Arthur Tooth & Sons. In 1958, Crozier was lent a cottage in Pebmarsh, North Essex and subsequently divided his time between there and London. For Crozier the bleak empty estuaries and the wilderness of the marshes of Essex was a ravaged landscape which symbolised the torment and fear of the post-war condition at the heart of existentialism. In the introduction to Crozier’s 1961 Drian show, G. M. Butcher wrote, “if there is one thing that Crozier wishes to get across in all his painting, it is a mood of fear, anxiety, unease. This is his personal reaction to the world as it is - where savagery is only just beneath the surface.” Profoundly affected by post-war existential philosophy, Crozier consciously allied himself and his work with contemporary European art throughout the 1950s and 1960s, towards painters such as Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Nicolas de Staël. Extended stays in Paris in 1947, 1950, and 1953 were formational experiences: “To be in Paris then was to be at the centre of the world. Anyone who was not young in 1949 and who did not sit in the Café de Flore or the Deux Magots, where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were as gods, simply cannot appreciate the sheer excitement that enveloped the young of Europe emotionally, physically and intellectually.” Crozier taught at the Bath Academy of Art, the Central School of Art and Design, the Studio School in New York and finally at Winchester School of Art. In 1973 he became an Irish citizen, having been born to Irish parents, and lived between homes in West Cork and Hampshire. In 1991 the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and the Royal Hibernian Academy, of which he was an honorary member, curated a retrospective of his work. Crozier was awarded the Premio Lissone in Milan and the Oireachtas Gold medal for Painting in Dublin in 1994. A major retrospective was held in 2017 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Late 1961 marks a change in direction in Crozier’s work as the human figure makes an appearance in his work, firstly as part of the landscape then in a picture such as ‘Ennis’ as an isolated, prostrate nude. Crozier’s nude figures are rarely portraits, rather he creates a symbolic figure that, as SB Kennedy has written ‘evokes a universal feeling of submission and resignation in the face of impenetrable odds.’(SB Kennedy, William Crozier, (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2007), p.12) Crozier made no distinction between his landscape and figure compositions and spoke of the relation of one to the other as ‘I wanted landscape and the figure to be one in nature…in the factual sense that someone who is in a state of stress or is in a state of isolation sees the world as a projection of themselves.’ (William Crozier interviewed by Ian Kirkwood, Artlog no.5. Winchester, 1979) The significance of the title is more elliptical. In 1961 Crozier had made a tour of the Republic of Ireland, when he visited the town of Ennis. Like other paintings of the nude in 1962, including ‘Portumna’, Crozier applied a place name to an image of a female nude, making an explicit reference to the town he had visited. With ‘Ennis’ he alluded to a dramatic moment in the town’s history when, in 1923, the Republican statesman Éamon de Valera was arrested in O’Connell Square while addressing a public meeting. On his release from prison in 1924, De Valera returned to Ennis, beginning his address to the crowd with ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted.’ Political tumult, the power of the individual voice, and continuity or resurgence through the passage of time are all themes from this anecdote that may have excited Crozier’s imagination. Art critic George Butcher, writing in 1961, described Crozier’s earlier landscapes as imbued with “a mood of fear, anxiety, unease. This is his own personal reaction to the world as it is – where savagery is only just beneath the surface.” (Quoted in Sarah Victoria Turner, ‘Savagery, just beneath the surface: William Crozier’s early work’, William Crozier: the Edge of Landscape, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art (Dublin: 2017) p.11) The introduction of the figure complicates Butcher’s comment – in the context of 'Ennis', the friction of political discourse is now released instead of savagery. However, Crozier’s startling use of emotive abstract colour to evoke historical anxiety or strife remains.