Like William Orpen and Henry Lamb, Augustus John was drawn to Ireland and what he saw as the ancient, ‘primitive’ aspect of the country’s heritage, and a distant, almost pagan past that echoed what he had seen in Normandy and among the Romany peoples that so fascinated him wherever he travelled in Europe. Like the Romany, the ancient folk customs of rural Ireland suggested an older, more spiritual (and certainly far less corrupted) world—distant from big European cities, industry, modernity and all its trappings, conventions and social restrictions.

John first visited Ireland in 1907, not long after the death of Ida in Paris. He travelled to Galway to make a portrait of the poet W.B. Yeats, and returned a number of times to the west coast before and during the Great War. On one occasion in Galway City he met James Dickson Innes by chance, and they talked of taking a studio there together.

A new friend, Francis Macnamara, took John to little back street pubs where they listened to Irish sagas and songs: ‘At dusk’, John recalled, ‘dark forms could be espied, lurking among the fallen balks of the old timber-yard beyond, and women still lingered, murmuring, by the Spanish Gate—a face, or part of a face, blooming for an instant from shadowy veils and quickly averted.’ John was entranced, and made numerous studies like this one of the Galway people, often working very quickly, abandoning technical finesse in order to capture character. His visits led to his major mural series, Galway (1916 and 1920), now in the Tate collection.